Then a “Green Paper” revealing the Clinton Administration’s preliminary views on data highways and copyright came out. It was even more horrid than I could have imagined, an insult to the memory of Andrew Carnegie. The ethos was exactly the opposite of TeleRead’s. For example, if the paper became law, one could not transmit a newspaper article to a few friends; the present ambiguities here would be resolved in favor of the copyright holders. Yes, Washington should not allow anyone to bootleg newspaper stories or magazine items for hundreds of people in an electronic discussion group. In fact, I’d once reported a gross offender to a magazine; I believed passionately in property rights. Clearly electronic books, of all media, should enjoy protection, which, in fact, TeleRead would promote by making piracy less lucrative. But we also had to understand the purpose of copyright law—to help spread information in a democracy and further the progress of science and the arts. Lehman either was disingenuous or had let his old $430,000 make him a little amnesic toward Constitutional tradition. Ironically, if Lehman’s side won out, writers and journalists would be among the biggest victims of the very law designed to protect us. After all, we were not just producers of information; we were also consumers. To write a book I would absorb millions of words from the Internet, swapping information with friend after friend along the way, including, yes, some electronic newspaper clips. But the Green Paper bizarrely flouted the natural tendency of most people to _share_. Imagine the effect on teachers and children. Quite rightly, Jim Warren observed that Washington was cheating the public “to avoid controversy among ‘important’ people.” “The Draft Report comes down firmly on the side of increased rights for copyright owners in all relevant contexts, endorsing the goal of enhanced copyright protection without acknowledging any countervailing concerns,” wrote Jessica Litman, a law professor at Detroit’s Wayne State University. In a reply to the Administration she said of the report: “It appears to be an advocacy document: It at times misrepresents the state of current law, and gives voice to only one side of complicated policy debates.” Another expert, law professor Pamela Samuelson at the University of Pittsburgh, lambasted the Green Paper in an article for _Communications of the ACM_, published by the Association for Computing Machinery. She said that “not since the King of England in the sixteenth century gave a group of printers exclusive rights to print books in exchange for the printers’ agreement not to print heretical or seditious material has a government copyright policy been so skewed in favor of publisher interests and so detrimental to the public interest.” Contrary to Washington’s claim, the Green Paper was not just a tweaking of existing law but a radical revision in favor of publishers.[6.44]