The Future of Ideas
A week ago, I finally finished Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas. Everybody should read it. In the meantime, everybody should read these passages I’ve excerpted—bold emphasis mine—courtesy of the book’s Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
From pages 249-250:
Technology, tied to law, now promises almost perfect control over content and its distribution. And it is this perfect control that threatens to undermine the potential for innovation that the Internet promises.
To resist this threat, we need specific changes to reestablish a balance between control and creativity. Our aim should be a system of sufficient control to give artists enough incentive to produce, while leaving free as much as we can for others to build upon and create.
In setting this balance, there are a few ideas to keep in mind. First, we live in a world with “free” content, and this freedom is not an imperfection. We listen to the radio without paying for the songs we hear; we hear friends humming tunes that they have not licensed. We refer to plots in movies to tell jokes without the permission of the director. We read books to our children borrowed from a library without any payment for performance rights to the original copyright holder. The fact that content at any particular time is free tells us nothing about whether using that content is “theft.” Similarly, an argument for increasing control by content owners needs more than “they didn’t pay for this use” to back it up.
Second, and related, the reason perfect control is not our aim is that creation is always the building upon something else. There is no art that doesn’t reuse. And there will be less art if every reuse is taxed by the earlier appropriator. Monopoly controls have been the exception in free society; they have been the rule in closed societies.
Finally, while control is needed, and perfectly justifiable, our bias should be clear up front: Monopolies are not justified by theory; they should be permitted only when justified by facts. If there is no solid basis for extending a certain monopoly protection, then we should not extend that protection… Before the monopoly should be permitted, there should be reason to believe it will do some good—for society, and not just for monopoly holders.
And from page 265:
The law is the instrument through which a technological revolution is undone. And since we barely understand how the technologists built this revolution, we don’t even see when the lawyers take it away. As activist and technologist John Gilmore has put it, in a line that captures the puzzle of this book: “[W]e have invented the technology to eliminate scarcity, but we are deliberately throwing it away to benefit those who profit from scarcity. . . . I think,” Gilmore continues, “we should embrace the era of plenty, and work out how to mutually live in it.”
Finally, this last paragraph of the book is compelling:
We move through this moment of an architecture of innovation to, once again, embrace an architecture of control—without noticing, without resistance, without so much as a question. Those threatened by this technology of freedom have learned how to turn the technology off. The switch is now being thrown. We are doing nothing about it.
Time to begin Free Culture.
I haven’t blogged in a while. So here’s a quick blog post—not really much of an opinion type entry but probably more of a quick overview of what’s going on.