Copyright

The single most important book on creativity and copyright

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• Monday 21st May 2007

Before I read Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture, I agreed with the general view of copyright and intellectual property; an idea has the same property characteristics as a car or a table. Copying the idea is theft, even if you copy only a small part for any reason, and even if you don’t sell it. It’s the view put forth by the media, the RIAA, the MPAA, and various other corporate trade organizations.

Because of the nature of many of the records I’ve made, this view made me a thief and a pirate. In some ways, that wasn’t the worst thing; for a “nice” middle-class boy, the transformation into a pirate was somewhat romantic and dashing, two qualities I never supposed I’d have.

After reading Lessig’s book the first time, I threw away my eyepatch and stopped twirling my mustache. I had to ask several questions that never occurred to me before: Why are there laws in the first place? What do they do? What is copyright’s purpose?

I can’t summarize the book; I’m not that good. Suffice it to say that it’s an exciting, down-to-earth examination of an issue that’s central to everyone who creates in any medium: writers, graphic artists, musicians, computer programmers – all the way down to an 8 year-old kid cruising the internet looking for an illustration for a school report.

Lessig’s an excellent writer, clear and concise; he’s a professor at Stamford Law who’s argued important cases in front of the Supreme Court, and he makes the legal arguments in the copyright battles easy to understand. The high stakes become quite clear, and the extent of the battle that’s already been lost to the forces of corporate greed is quite alarming.

The book’s available free as a downloadable PDF (see the first link), or you can buy it brand new, or buy it used (before that becomes illegal), or borrow it from your local library. And Burkhard (thanks!) just weighed in with the news that there’s a wonderful collective reading of the book available as a free downloadable audiobook.

Highly recommended. As mindblowing as Chomsky.

But when the copyright owners oppose a proposal such as the Eldred Act, then, finally, there is an example that lays bare the naked self-interest driving this war. This act would free an extraordinary range of content that is otherwise unused. It wouldn’t interfere with any copyright owner’s desire to exercise continued control over his content. It would simply liberate what Kevin Kelly calls the “Dark Content” that fills archives around the world. So when the warriors [RIAA, MPAA, etc.] oppose a change like this, we should ask one simple question:

What does this industry really want?

With very little effort, the warriors could protect their content. So the effort to block something like the Eldred Act is not really about protecting their content. The effort to block the Eldred Act is an effort to assure that nothing more passes into the public domain. It is another step to assure that the public domain will never compete, that there will be no use of content that is not commercially controlled, and that there will be no commercial use of content that doesn’t require their permission first.

The opposition to the Eldred Act reveals how extreme the other side is. The most powerful and sexy and well-loved of lobbies really has as its aim not the protection of “property” but the rejection of a tradition. Their aim is not simply to protect what is theirs. Their aim is to assure that all there is is what is theirs.