Putnam died in 1955 in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, at ninety-three years of age. The world he left behind was caught in social and technological transition, just as it had been when he first arrived in Washington. The Soviet launch of the satellite Sputnik in 1957 precipitated a thirty-year game of Keeping Up with the Khrushchevs during which the US government directed unprecedented sums toward laboratories, universities, and research agencies charged with devising technologies that would help America overtake its Russian rivals. In 1961, America launched the astronaut Alan Shepard into outer space—one month after the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made his own star tracks.
If the United States at the time couldn’t quite match the USSR in interstellar accomplishments, it could at least demonstrate its superiority on the ground. On March 13, 1962, President John F. Kennedy addressed the House of Representatives with festive news. The 1964 New York World’s Fair was approaching, and Kennedy had endorsed the construction of a federal pavilion that would celebrate everything America had to offer the world of the future. The theme of the pavilion was Challenge to Greatness, and in his speech to Congress, the president explained that the proposed pavilion would “present to the world not a boastful picture of our unparalleled progress, but a picture of democracy—its opportunities, its problems, its inspirations, and its freedoms.”
By the time the fair opened in 1964, event organizers and sponsors had transformed Flushing Meadow Park into a showcase for American industrial progress, an idealized, chrome-plated version of a future that would soon be on sale at a department store near you.43 The fair was dominated by American corporate pavilions, most of which attempted to embody the fair’s subtheme: Man’s Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe. The Du Pont chemicals pavilion offered forty-eight performances per day of the “Wonderful World of Chemistry” musical revue, which was followed immediately by “about two dozen demonstrations of startling uses for products made by Du Pont.”44 The Formica World’s Fair House promised that housekeeping would be a dream just as soon as all the walls in your home were covered in plastic laminate.45
Like every other pavilion at Flushing Meadow Park, Challenge to Greatness was a sales pitch—but instead of touting household chemicals or synthetic walls, the pavilion advertised the American way of life. Visitors to Challenge to Greatness were clobbered by appropriate symbolism from the moment they arrived. Upon approach, they were greeted by the likeness of a gigantic eagle, which presided imperiously over the steps leading up to the pavilion. Next, they viewed a short film titled Voyage to America—an ode to the immigrant spirit. The centerpiece was an educational theme-park ride called the American Journey, in which the star of the television program Wagon Train intoned a sentimental script by the novelist Ray Bradbury that encouraged visitors to “move with heart and purpose toward a tomorrow of your own choosing.”46
The idea that Americans are free to choose their own tomorrows underpinned the Challenge to Greatness. The national emphasis on bootstrapping, on self-improvement, was just as strong in 1964 as it had been in Webster’s time, and intellectual mobility remained as important to America’s success as economic and physical mobility. So it was perhaps appropriate that the tour of the American pavilion, which began with a bald eagle, concluded with another symbol of the nation’s untethered spirit: a library.
In 1895, Herbert Putnam wrote that the rise of the public library in America had advanced “a novel idea: that a book has an active as well as a passive duty to perform; that it should not merely be hospitable to those who come to seek, but should itself go forth, should seek out the individual and impress its stored-up activities upon him.”47 Ever since then, progressive librarians have worked toward the establishment of a library where the knowledge you needed could find you—or, at the very least, would always be at your disposal, regardless of race, gender, creed, or bank balance. As Kennedy himself had put it, in a quote prominently displayed in the Challenge to Greatness pavilion, “Books and libraries and the will to use them are among the most important tools our nation has to diffuse knowledge and to develop our powers of creative wisdom.” Part of the challenge would come in trying to use new technologies to meet this ideal.
Library/USA, the final stop on the visitor’s tour of the extravaganza, was a large exhibit sponsored by the American Library Association. “We anticipate that [the visitor’s] curiosity will have been aroused at many points” in his trip to the fair, the organizers wrote, and the Library/USA exhibit was there to sate that curiosity. It featured a team of reference librarians ready to answer visitors’ questions, a full working children’s library called Children’s World (“the man who reads begins as a child who reads”), an inside look at the president’s library, and many other bibliocentric displays. Perhaps most exotic of all, the exhibit featured a UNIVAC 490 Real-Time computer that could, within seconds of being asked, provide visitors with detailed information about many of the topics broached in the preceding exhibits.
The UNIVAC epitomized one of the fair’s general themes: Peace Through Understanding. As the wall text of the Library/USA exhibit noted, “In the last 20 years mankind has acquired more scientific information than in all previous history.” But the resources were not equally distributed. “Good libraries are not available to all,” the curators observed. “More people will need more knowledge.” Mechanized libraries, they submitted, would facilitate the frictionless sharing of information, which would in turn help close the international knowledge gap.
Upon leaving Library/USA, visitors were presented with a UNIVAC printout titled “Challenge to Greatness,” which was supposed to be “symbolic of the continuing challenge to increase each person’s free access to sources of information.” One can hardly think of a better closing image with which to leave pavilion-goers—a better summation of the installation’s themes, of one way the country might meet the challenges of tomorrow—than this peek at what could only be considered the library of the future.
One year after the World’s Fair began, in August 1965, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology collected some of its brightest minds in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to help make the library of the future a thing of the present. Microfilm and digital computers promised to revolutionize information storage, retrieval, and transfer, and MIT wanted to integrate these technologies into the infrastructure of the modern library. For the next five weeks, the MIT scholars, alongside various visitors and special guests, discussed plans for a prototype digitized library system far more advanced than anything found in Library/USA. They called their undertaking Project Intrex.
The name Project Intrex—Intrex was short for “information transfer complex”—sounds like something out of a Cold War spy movie, and that’s not too far from the truth. The Independence Foundation, a group that itself drew funding from the CIA, sponsored the Woods Hole conference. The project was headquartered at MIT, which had already effectively become a research arm of the federal government. The project’s top men had spent years working at government-sponsored research agencies, such as Lincoln Lab, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and the RAND Corporation. An implicit objective was to employ the technology that Intrex developed to help the United States thwart the Soviet menace; from this perspective, libraries were important insofar as they could help scientists build new and better weapons more quickly.
The keynote speaker who launched the Intrex conference that August was, appropriately, the godfather of what today we call Big Science. Vannevar Bush was no stranger to government-university partnerships. First as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s science adviser during World War II, and then as the motive behind the creation of the National Science Foundation, Bush, as much as anyone, was responsible for the militarization of American academic science. In 1965, he was seventy-five years old, and his long and complicated career was nearing its end. His brief remarks to the group at Woods Hole were wistful: “I merely wish I were young enough to participate with you in the fascinating intricacies you w
ill encounter and bring under your control.”48
Vannevar rhymes with believer, and when it came to government funding of scientific research, Bush certainly was. He was also a lifelong believer in libraries, and the benefits to be derived from their automation. In 1945, he published an article in the Atlantic Monthly that proposed a rudimentary mechanized library called Memex, a linked-information retrieval system. Memex was a desk-size machine that was equal parts stenographer, filing cabinet, and reference librarian: “a device in which an individual stores his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.”49 The goal was to build a machine that could capture a user’s thought patterns, compile and organize his reading material and correspondence, and record the resulting “associative trails” between them all, such that the user could trace his end insights back to conception. Imagine the thrill, for example, of plumbing the neural archives of the man who invented whistling, and being able to trace the development of that concept, step by step, all the way back to that magic moment when he realized that he might be able to improve on the hum.
The world of 1945 wasn’t quite ready for Memex, or quite capable of building it. But the world had changed in the intervening decades, and in 1965 it looked as if the Memex concept might finally come to life. In his introductory remarks to the Intrex conference, Bush maintained that computerized libraries would transform society, and that Project Intrex would “influence, perhaps revolutionize, the methods of every professional group—in law, medicine, the humanities. It will support every phase of our general culture. I believe very few scholars today realize what this could mean. I am sure the general public does not realize, for instance, that success in this program could mean as much to their well-being, their health, as has been produced by the power of antibiotics.”50 Even the most pragmatic men couldn’t help but sound idealistic when it came to libraries and their potential to change the world.
* * *
AS librarians and scientists were touting technology’s ability to ease and improve the spread of information, a group of copyright lawyers were meeting in Washington, DC, to discuss ways to restrict that data. The federal copyright statute had gone largely unrevised since 1909 and was far behind the times. “I am confronted daily with what are now being called the ‘information explosion’ and the ‘communications explosion,’ ” said L. Quincy Mumford, librarian of Congress, in 1965. “It is obvious to me that these revolutionary developments carry with them a profound challenge to creative endeavor, and that our antiquated copyright law must be revised to meet this challenge. The longer this task is delayed, the harder it will be to accomplish, and the more serious will be the loss for future generations.”51
Mumford asked the register of copyrights, a genial man named Abraham Kaminstein, to convene a panel of eminent copyright lawyers to draft yet another copyright law of the future. They were, of course, determined to avoid the mistakes of the past. The panel’s goal was both to extend copyright terms and to expand copyright protections to all sorts of new media. Antediluvian entertainments, such as silent films and piano rolls, had given way to record players, jukeboxes, 3-D movies, and other new technologies, all of which had prompted innumerable copyright questions. Did artificial flowers deserve copyright protection? What about “the smellies”—the short-lived breed of films that blasted relevant odors into the theater? And what about machine-to-machine communication? Or even extrasensory perception?
“This is serious,” said Herman Finkelstein of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). “It’s serious because, when Scrutton wrote his book on copyright back in the last century, he said, ‘Beware. Those people who talk about a short term of copyright may be leading us into communism.’ ”52 This cultural-siege mentality, as much as anything, seems to have motivated the copyright advocates as they set about drafting the new law. Irwin Karp, representing the Authors League of America, spoke for many when he observed, “We’re writing a law now that may last another fifty years. Even though all of the evils and dangers that we raise may not exist in their fullest extent today, they may be existing five years from now.”53
The challenge for the panel, then, was to devise a bill specific enough to protect the rights of existing stakeholders, but broad enough to cover technologies that did not yet exist. One of the most vocal participants, an attorney named John Schulman, set the tone in the early going when he expounded upon a copyright truth that seemed self-evident: “Why would a man write a book—a textbook or something else—unless he had an opportunity of improving himself economically? Why do we hesitate to say that we are talking about the right of an author to earn a livelihood? That’s what we’re talking about.”54
And that was the prevailing sentiment expressed by the new bill’s supporters, both in private panel discussions and, later, in congressional testimony. Copyright was depicted as a paragon of the American way of life—which, like so much else about America at the time, seemed under attack from chaos agents willfully rejecting the nation’s fundamental values. In May 1965, Will Dillon, the eighty-seven-year-old co-composer of the sentimental barbershop standard “I Want a Girl (Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad),” urged Congress to extend copyright terms. In his brief testimony, he pulled on every imaginable heartstring, citing Winston Churchill, Arlington National Cemetery, World War II, even trotting out his granddaughter, Georgia Ann Murdock, to read a prepared statement, perhaps reasoning that everything sounds more sincere if said by a granddaughter.55 Few of her grandfather’s songs had “survived the ravages of time and changes in public taste,” Murdock read. If the copyright on “Dear Old Dad” was allowed to expire, Dillon would lose the mainstay of his income. Allowing old songs and books to fall into the public domain served only to impoverish America’s elderly songwriters and their adorable progeny.
Not everyone was convinced by these arguments. “We keep hearing about the rights of various groups of authors, producers, broadcasters, and so on,” said Ralph S. Brown Jr., a Yale Law professor, and one of the few voices of moderate dissent among those debating and shaping the bill. “Occasionally an attempt is made to define ‘the public.’ A few moments ago a definition of ‘the public’ occurred to me—that ‘the public,’ from the standpoint of these discussions, is anybody from whom another nickel can be milked for copyright owners.”56
Brown was decidedly a minority voice. In a remarkable sequence early on, one participant after another challenged the utility, public benefit, and very legitimacy of the public domain. “I don’t believe that, just because a work goes into the public domain, that the public is benefited,” declared John R. Peterson of the American Bar Association. “Stated in our Constitution itself is the fundamental public interest there, to stimulate creativity. I don’t think it stimulates creativity to tell people that they are welcome to copy what someone else has written.”57 When a work entered the public domain, according to this logic, it represented a loss of valuable rights for the author rather than a gain of valuable rights by the public.
If neither the public nor creators benefitted from limited copyright terms, then who did benefit? The answer, as always, was pirates. Pirates have no place in polite society: they wench, they carouse, they make their victims walk the plank. Worst of all, pirates use violence to help themselves to other people’s property. The term pirate groups copyright infringers in the same category as Blackbeard, Captains Kidd and Hook, and other notorious maritime villains. It’s hard to recover from that initial mental association, from the image of rogue bands of printers, tape dubbers, and photoduplicatrixes roaming the oceans of copyright, ruthlessly plundering innocents for their personal gain.
In the prelude to the Copyright Act of 1976, pirates proliferated. They were in the classroom, masquerading as harmless teachers, their most enduring lesson being a profound disrespect for private property. They loitered in lending libraries; they seized the control rooms of loca
l educational-television stations; they lurked in basements with tape decks, illegally copying copyrighted music and distributing it without paying the composer for the privilege. They were especially to be found in the corner taverns, dancing their mirthless pirate jigs to songs blaring from the jukebox.
To resolve the dispute between composers and the infernal-talking-machine proprietors, the 1909 framers created a public-performance clause, wherein composers were compensated if their works were exhibited in public. But the framers decided that a song played on a jukebox did not constitute a public performance; in 1909, jukeboxes were more like primitive personal stereo systems.
Since that time, however, jukebox technology had improved, and by 1960, America’s taverns and hamburger joints had approximately half a million jukeboxes, each earning a small fortune in small change per year, not a cent of which went to the composers of the songs it played.58 The jukebox owners had no reason to retain their exemption from the public-performance clause, copyright holders argued. The shortsightedness of legislators in 1909 in not anticipating the rise of Wurlitzer Nation didn’t mean that Elvis and the Beach Boys should miss out on royalties, the panel felt. They wanted the loophole closed.
The photocopier, like the jukebox, inspired fear and loathing among members of the copyright committee. Though mechanized document-duplication devices had existed since the 1920s, the invention in 1959 of the one-piece photocopier, or Xerox machine, made photoduplication a veritable pleasure rather than a rage-inducing chore. Now, with minimal effort, anyone could duplicate any bit of printed content he or she desired. Much of the discussion during the meetings was devoted to strategies for thwarting the rise of the Xerox machines.
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