There are few professions in American society that haven't claimed Benjamin Franklin as one of their own. Inventors and scientists chime in first, followed by newspaper editors, typographers, postal workers, astronomers, engineers, diplomats, civil rights advocates, libertarians, socialists, and revolutionaries of all flavors.

Mr. Franklin has also picked up some fans among hedonists and voluptuaries of late, especially after the Parisian bathtub scene in the recent HBO series John Adams, which tweaked a rediscovery of his interesting essay on how to choose a mistress.

We thought the great man had been carved up into as many occupational and philosophical pieces as possible. But then we stumbled across Lewis Hyde's diverting new book Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership, which includes a chapter titled, "Benjamin Franklin, Founding Pirate."

In his essays, letters, and actions, Franklin was a "commonwealth man in the style of Jefferson," Hyde writes. He understood the United States Constitution's copyright language "as a balance between a short-term monopoly and a long-term grant to the public. That the clause might become the ground for creating a perpetual property right for individuals and private corporations would have astounded him."

Benjamin Franklin rebelled against knowledge as eternal property through his whole life. Hyde gives us a portrait of him that reveals this in his writings and works.

The Sentry Box

A half a century after Franklin died in 1790, the transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson appropriated him in his famous essay, "On Self Reliance."

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton?

This was a "bizarre" misrepresentation, Hyde insists, because Franklin saw the whole world as his instructor. "That we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of Others," he once wrote, "we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously."

Newton once famously declared that he made his discoveries by "standing on the shoulders of giants." This was a reference to the mathematician/philosopher Descartes, but Franklin saw giants everywhere—among ingenious farmers, tinkerers, craftspeople, and his next door neighbors.

In the late 1740s he and three of them collaborated in an attic Pennsylvania laboratory, experimenting with electricity. The end result produced the key words that we associate with the phenomenon, including "electrician," and even "electric shock," followed by the first modern battery. When he began to work with lightning, Franklin made no secret of his efforts. He sent to a friend in London his ideas on a "sentry box" with a grounded iron rod that could attract and safely divert the force.

The correspondent, in turn, published the essay, which was translated into French, and the translator tried the experiment himself with success. After Franklin did the same and furthered the idea with a kite, he published his findings in the Pennsylvania Gazette and Poor Richard's Almanac, with detailed instructions on how to build "lightening rods" for one's home or business.

There was no hint of self-promotion in his prose. These applications had been created in Paris, Franklin noted, and "the same Experiment has succeeded in Philadelphia, tho' made in a different and more easy Manner, which any one may try, as follows."

In fact, he didn't even bother to identify himself as the inventor of this technology for securing buildings "from Mischief By Thunder." It has "pleased God in his Goodness to Mankind, at length to discover them," Franklin wrote.

The Stove

This wasn't false modesty, Hyde insists. Franklin, an avid correspondent with inventors around the world, just saw everything he did as an extension of that open, collaborative process. Thus, as he explained in his Autobiography, he declined to patent his unique stove.

In order of time, I should have mentioned before, that having, in 1742, invented an open stove for the better warming of rooms, and at the same time saving fuel, as the fresh air admitted was warmed in entering, I made a present of the model to Mr. Robert Grace, one of my early friends, who, having an iron-furnace, found the casting of the plates for these stoves a profitable thing, as they were growing in demand. To promote that demand, I wrote and published a pamphlet, entitled "An Account of the new-invented Pennsylvania Fireplaces; wherein their Construction and Manner of Operation is particularly explained; their Advantages above every other Method of warming Rooms demonstrated; and all Objections that have been raised against the Use of them answered and obviated," etc. This pamphlet had a good effect. Gov'r. Thomas was so pleas'd with the construction of this stove, as described in it, that he offered to give me a patent for the sole vending of them for a term of years; but I declin'd it.

It was in this passage that Franklin articulated his earlier quoted philosophy—that we should share ideas as gratefully as we receive them. "The use of these fireplaces in very many houses, both of this and the neighboring colonies, has been, and is, a great saving of wood to the inhabitants," he concluded.

The Ship

Like many of the founders of this country, Franklin didn't really see copy or patent rights as "rights," Hyde contends. He saw them as temporary monopoly privileges, designed to encourage writers and inventors to produce things that would ultimately accrue to the common good. To the extent that he supported these sort of monopolies, it was to coax the best out of people.

And so in 1781, he urged a law offering emigrants to the new nation with useful ideas a seven year "Property" on their innovations. Hyde says this wasn't just a form of economic nationalism. Franklin found infuriating British laws expressly forbidding glass blowers, clock makers, and other artisans from leaving the country. "Tyrannical," he called them, making a "Prison of England" and trapping the skilled "for no other Crime but that of being useful & Industrious."

None of this was directed at Britain out of national rivalry. Such was Franklin's passion for new and open knowledge, that during the Revolutionary War he used his diplomatic office to plead for the protection of the British explorer Cook's expedition to the South Sea islands. If the English ship should "fall into your hands," he instructed American vessels, do not "consider her as an Enemy, nor suffer any Plunder to be made of the Effects contained in her, nor obstruct her immediate Return to England."

As for trade protection laws, he thought them just as obnoxious as emigration bans.

"If Books can be had much cheaper from Ireland," Franklin wrote to a friend, "(which I believe for I bought Blackstone there for 24s. when it was sold in England for 4 Guineas) is not this an Advantage, not to English Booksellers indeed, but to English Readers, and to Learning?"

The Pirate

From where did this passion for openness come? Hyde finds its root in colonial America's rejection of the English guild system, with its mania for trade secrecy and accompanying oaths swearing never to divulge guild techniques. The popular narrative of Franklin's life attributes physical abuse as the cause of his running away from his newspaper apprenticeship with his older brother. But Common as Air contends that his departure was, in effect, an act of intellectual rebellion.

"The law binding apprentices to their masters was there precisely to help keep proprietary knowledge from wandering," Hyde writes, "and Franklin broke that law." He broke it for the rest of his days every time he published technical or scientific knowledge in his newspapers and Poor Richard's Almanac. "Seen in this light, the young man's flight from Boston was a foundational act of American piracy."

In the year of Franklin's death, Congress passed its first Copyright Act, which gave authors and publishers a 14 year exclusive right to their works, renewable for another 14. But we don't think that it would have astounded this worldly inventor that today the "life" of the "author" (or corporation) plus 70 years is the law. After all, he became a revolutionary because he understood where corruption could take nations, and the threat that knowledge posed to that process.

"Arbitrary governments," Franklin wrote in 1783, "are likely to become more mild and reasonable, and to expire by degrees," thanks to the "art of printing, which diffuses so general a light, augmenting with the growing day, and so penetrating a nature, that all the window-shutters, which despotism and priestcraft can oppose to keep it out, prove insufficient."