The Atlantic magazine has put out its yearly Ideas Issue. I always look forward to it -- sure, not all of the ideas are great, and many are questionable, but that's to be expected when a lot of ideas are gathered together. They're often still instructive, sometimes the more so for being deliberately provocative.
But every so often, there's one whose most interesting characteristic is that it managed to get past the editors at all. This year, it's from Elizabeth Wurtzel, and it reads, in full:
Of the Founders’ genius ideas, few trump intellectual-property rights. At a time when Barbary pirates still concerned them, the Framers penned an intellectual-property clause—the world’s first constitutional protection for copyrights and patents. In so doing, they spawned Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Motown, and so on. Today, we foolishly flirt with undoing that. In a future where all art is free (the future as pined for by Internet pirates and Creative Commons zealots), books, songs, and films would still get made. But with nobody paying for them, they’d be terrible. Only people who do lousy work do it for free.
Er. Where to start? The vertigo-inducing ahistoricity? The clumsy attempt at guilt-by-association through a spurious double mention of pirates? The unexamined assumption that copyright restrictions are how artists get paid?
Or how about just with a rewrite:
Of the Founders’ genius ideas, few trump intellectual-property rights. At a time when Barbary pirates still concerned them, the Framers penned an intellectual-property clause—the world’s first constitutional protection for copyrights and patents—into a justly famous document that they composed for no compensation and that was in the public domain from the moment it was first published. In so doing, they spawned Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Motown, and so on. Today, we foolishly flirt with undoing that. In a future where all art is free (the future as pined for by Internet pirates and Creative Commons zealots), books, songs, and films would still get made. But with nobody paying for them, they’d be terrible. Only people who do lousy work do it for free.
My suggested edits are in red.
