John Conyers, first and foremost, is a great friend to artists and creators. He is also a great man who has accomplished marvelous things in his many decades as a public servant. But just the other day he was attacked by two people who in a better world would correctly view him as a compatriot in freedom and transparency. These two individuals accused Chairman Conyers of selling himself, and the Chairman has been forced to respond.

This is where online “debate” has brought us, to the point where the leader of a major House committee — a man who has been a champion of civil rights and civil liberties — has to take the time to post a blog(!) defending himself from corruption charges because groups who agree with him on an issue have given him $9,000.

Here is what Lawrence Lessig and Michael Eisen wrote in a Huffington Post blog entry titled “Is John Conyers Shilling for Special Interests?” regarding the fact that the $9,000 in donations was twice that received by those not co-sponsoring Conyers’ bill:

This is exactly the kind of money-for-influence scheme that constantly happens behind our backs and erodes the public’s trust in government.

I’ll address the bill in question in a minute, but Conyers’ post centers on the corruption charge, and that’s key.

That kind of accusation, in a well-read forum such as the Huffington Post, is reckless and irresponsible. As a journalist I received nine awards for investigative journalism, one a first-place award from the Society of Professional Journalists for an investigation involving 70,000 donations to presidential primary campaigns in 2004. (Try reading that many individual donation forms without your eyes falling out.) Transparency is important and I felt good about bringing to light connections between politicians and donors. But I also knew that one can’t assume a politician acts a certain way because of donations, and had I drawn such an assumption in my reporting on that series, I not only would have gone without an SPJ award, I would have been fired.

Of course, law professors can’t be fired for writing a blog entry.

Here’s part of the response by Chairman Conyers:

To hear Professor Lessig tell it, I introduced a bill that is utterly without merit and entirely the product of shady special interest dealing. Without any evidence to support his contention (other than my receipt of what can only be described as modest contributions from publishers), he labels my motivations for introducing this bill as “corrupt,” accuses me of “shilling” for “Big Paper,” and dismisses the whole thing as nothing more than a “money for influence scheme.” This even though one of the very columns cited by Professor Lessig reviews the campaign financing at issue and concludes that “the numbers here are not large” and that “I don’t think the numbers in the MAPLight report support Lessig and Eisen’s contention that the bill is a ‘money-for-influence scheme.’”

Apparently, on the basis of this one piece of legislation he dislikes, Professor Lessig is willing to wave away my forty years of fighting against special interests, including for example my authorship (along with then Senator Barack Obama) of an anti-lobbying law that established reform groups labeled a “landmark” law. I have supported public financing legislation favored by Professor Lessig since it was first proposed.

Professor Lessig has a history of this, by the way. When he considered last year running for the U.S. House seat vacated by the death of Congressman Lantos, he announced his potential candidacy by posting an online video in which he accused beloved activist and state legislator Jackie Speier, with absolutely no foundation, of corruption. Fortunately the absurd charge had no effect, and Ms. Speier was elected to the seat by a huge margin.

In the Internet age, it seems to be fair game to throw out an accusation and expect the one you’re accusing to defend himself or herself. That is what happened here; apparently Chairman Conyers felt leaving the blog unanswered, to remain on the Internet forever, wasn’t an answer. (Note, that hateful post won’t go away, will be found by Google searches far into the future, and the post has no indication anywhere on the page that Chairman Conyers has responded.)

Professor Lessig and Mr. Eisen have a right to their opinions. They feel Chairman Conyers’ bill, HR-801, fails to meet the openness test they associate with research at least partially funded by the federal government. I disagree. I support
Chairman Conyers’ effort, and feel it isn’t appropriate for the federal government to use publishers and their peer reviews as a quality-control mechanism, outsourcing work without payment.

If NIH were serious about making sure federally funded research were made public, they would allow every grant recipient to upload their papers the moment they were written. NIH obviously recognizes their site would be so littered with poor scholarship that no one would use the site; the trust wouldn’t be there. They want to appropriate the peer-review trust without doing it themselves.

I believe Chairman Conyers is sympathetic with this argument, but I know he takes issue with the fact that copyright owners saw their rights diluted without say of his committee. He writes this:

First, there is a serious process issue at stake here. My bill would restore longstanding federal copyright policy in this area. It reverses a provision slipped into an appropriations bill in the middle of the night, with no consultation with the Committee which is actually supposed to write the law in this area, the Judiciary Committee, which I chair. Thus, Professor Lessig simply ignores that this so-called “open access” policy was not subject to open hearings, open debate or open amendment in Congress and itself represents the sort of process-compromised special interest provision that he generally rails against. Now the special interests here may be highly worthy, but an openness hawk such as Professor Lessig ought not countenance procedural gimmicks just because they yielded a favored result.

When Professor Lessig said he was leaving the debate over copyright to crusade against corruption instead, he suggested that his point of view wasn’t being heard because of “a kind of corruption of the political process.” Apparently if he could get rid of money in politics, his views could get heard. Fair enough. But as the Chairman suggests, one man’s corruption is another man’s principle.

Professor Lessig likes to cite his friendship with Barack Obama. I know the two used to work together, and the President seems like the type of person who is happy to call many people his friend (the GOP tried unsuccessfully to hold one such friendship against him in the campaign). President Obama during the campaign restricted the type of campaign donations he would accept, although he also recognized that the free market can be superior to public funding when he opted out of the federal financing system for the general election.

One thing that is certain about President Obama, however, is that he recognizes that in any policy debate, people will have differences of opinion, and there is nothing insidious about that. Someone can disagree with you without being corrupted. The President seems to approach every discussion and every debate with an assumption that the person on the other side is sincere and principled.

We need a lot more of that in our society, and a lot less of assumptions the other way.

I wish Professor Lessig luck with his anti-corruption crusade — and after nearly two years still await his actual departure from the copyright debate — but I hope that he will learn that someone can disagree with him without that person being bought.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 3:59 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under Obama, blogging, capitol hill, copyright opponents, internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.