The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

My course schedule for this semester has not yet solidified, even though classes began yesterday. I know I am enrolled in one called "Copyright and Rhetoric." It has several focuses: one, on the presence one needs to comport oneself with to physically deliver an argument. Another is the study of rhetorical techniques in writing, and at the same time there's also the study of the policy arguments behind the copyright debates.

The class meets for three hours straight, and in the final hour of the first meeting Richard Stallman (RMS) of the Free Software Foundation gave a guest lecture about how words are deceptively used by those who would have intellectual property be, well, property. (I was happy to see RMS again. A few months before heading to law school I'd met him and told him I was going to law school. He tried to dissuade me, concerned that while I was off in school real battles would be won and lost without my assistance. Three years of uselessness while obtaining degree seemed a steep price. But I was steadfast in my commitment and he wished me well. Now he's concerned that my financial needs - read: loans - will further stymie my altruism. I'm having a harder time reassuring him on that point because my own concerns are so similar. Still, the idealism itself remains unscathed.)

He made several excellent points, the kind that sound completely obvious but you wouldn't have considered before they were pointed out, at which point you wonder how you didn't manage to think of them on your own. One such objection was that it makes as much sense to lump the discrete legal doctrines of patent, copyright, and trademark under the heading of intellectual property as the discretely different legal regimens of water regulation, rules for blood handling, ordinances on disposing of chemicals, and milk subsidization under the title "fluid law." Of course, with the "fluid law" example you at least base it on the fact that all the aforementioned objects of regulation are, in fact, fluids, whereas "intellectual property" is not actually property in any way that we've considered property to be in our law before. (Or at least not in the American legal tradition.) RMS also noted how insidious, superfluous words kept ending up sneaking into the policy discussion. Words like "protection." Will the song be ruined if it's played? he asked. Of course not, he answered himself. Then why does it need "protection?"

Although I have my definite leanings, I can still see merit in the policy discussion of whether it's best to treat "intellectual property" (using the term for the moment myself as the shorthand catchall of common parlance) legally the way it had been at its Jeffersonian origins, or if it's better to pursue a more comodified approach, as the advocates of "property" term would have it. But no amount of discourse will result in a reasoned decision if the discussion is warped by rhetorical pejorative.

Edits made 9/1. More 9/7.