download FREE CULTURE(PDF)

as Lessig would have it, then of course she did. Always pay attention
to the distinction between Lessig’s world and ours.
I missed the irony the first time I read it. I read it quickly and
thought the poster was supporting the idea that seeking balance was
what our government should be doing. (Of course, my criticism of Ms.
Boland was not about whether she was seeking balance or not; my
criticism was that her comments betrayed a first-year law student’s
mistake. I have no illusion about the extremism of our government,
whether Republican or Democrat. My only illusion apparently is about
whether our government should speak the truth or not.)
Obviously, however, the poster was not supporting that idea. Instead,
the poster was ridiculing the very idea that in the real world, the
“goal” of a government should be “to promote the right balance” of intellectual
property. That was obviously silly to him. And it obviously
betrayed, he believed, my own silly utopianism. “Typical for an academic,”
the poster might well have continued.
I understand criticism of academic utopianism. I think utopianism
is silly, too, and I’d be the first to poke fun at the absurdly unrealistic
ideals of academics throughout history (and not just in our own country’s
history).
But when it has become silly to suppose that the role of our government
should be to “seek balance,” then count me with the silly, for
that means that this has become quite serious indeed. If it should be
obvious to everyone that the government does not seek balance, that
the government is simply the tool of the most powerful lobbyists, that
the idea of holding the government to a different standard is absurd,
that the idea of demanding of the government that it speak truth and
not lies is just naïve, then who have we, the most powerful democracy
in the world, become?
It might be crazy to expect a high government official to speak
the truth. It might be crazy to believe that government policy will be
something more than the handmaiden of the most powerful interests.
268 FREE CULTURE