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By David Rothman

LBJNo secret that I’ve been picking on John Edwards–deservedly. I see some real potential if he’ll get serious about fighting poverty and declare his independence from the Hollywood money crowd. Valenti-esque copyright law is the enemy of poor people and of Poverty Fighter Number One, education. It can also harm high-tech job creation by saddling Net-related companies with new legal risks. If nothing else, without doubt, Hollywood-bought laws like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act will jack up the costs of digital libraries.

Instead of worrying about his friend Jack Valenti, Prof. Edwards would do better to consider a 1967 quote from Lyndon Baines Johnson, courtesy a PBS-related audio. I ran across this LBJism today via the latest On the Media program–a gem that would certainly seem in the spirit of a TeleRead-style approach. Of course, if George Bush wants to get bipartisan and beat John Edwards to the punch, that’s fine with me. Here is the LBJ quote:

I think we must consider new ways to build a great network for knowledge–not just a broadcast system but one that employs every means of sending and of storing information that the individual can use…The country doctor getting help from a distant labroatory or a teching hospital. A scholar in Atlanta might draw instantly on a library in New York. A famous teacher could reach with ideas and inspiration into some far-off classroom, so that no child need be neglected. Eventually I think this electronic knowledge bank could be as valuable as the federal reserve bank, and such a system could involve other nations. It could involve them in a partnership to share knowleddge and to thus enrich all mankind. A wild and visionary idea? Not at all. Yesterday’s strangest dreams are today’s headlines and change is getting swifter every moment.

I know. There’s bitter controversy over the federal funding of PBS. But could a compromise lie in one big lump sum to cast PBS out on its own–a notion that even some consevatives are considering? And along the way PBS could offer TeleRead-style services. The other thing to keep in mind is that most educational content is not political. Perhaps, with participation from foundations of all kinds, there would be a way to get around such questions while letting Washington directly or indirectly fund the less sensitive material–perhaps through an endowment of a kind already proposed. No, there is not any one answer to the controversies. But better to have controversies around than to tolerate all the Savage Inequalities of our present libraries and schools.

Why can’t today’s politicians–in both parties–dream like Lyndon Johnson? Yes, LBJ had flaws, major ones, but unlike Prof. Edwards, this former schoolteacher could readily grasp the connection between knowledge and prosperity. Come to think of it, Prof. Edwards is just like LBJ–self-made. As a textile worker’s son, does John Edwards have the courage to take on Hollywood’s manipulators and free the Net to serve schools, libraries and the rest of society? Here’s one thought. If we really care about rewards for creators, shouldn’t we worry less about long-dead writers’ estates and more about living creators–whose e-books, movies and other content could be purchased in appropriate cases by a well-stocked national digital library system? If anything, I believe that society is not rewarding creators sufficiently. But we need to pay creative people to create–rather than continue Jack Valenti’s multibillion-dollar copyright giveaways for entertainment conglomerates and rich heirs. Valenti, famous for the Vietnam-era claim that he slept better with LBJ in the White House, has said that he wants eternal copyright short of a day–a proposal that would be disastrous for online libraries. Is this really in the populist spirit of Valenti’s boss?

 
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