I'm interested in intellectual property and particularly in how things are playing out in the realms of technology, law, business and creation. I haven't had as much time as I'd like to track the discussion and debate. I do think it's extremely important to remember that creative effort doesn't spring forth in a vacuum, it builds from context, culture, and the creative efforts of earlier artists. It has to build from and access other creations because otherwise we have no tools within ourselves to understand and appreciate it.
Here are some current writings on intellectual property (not comprehensive or anything--things I can across today). Since this is a longish post itself (pointing to even longer things) I'll summarize the links up front:
If you're not familiar with Creative Commons licensing, find more info here.
Suw Charman writes about Lawerence Lessig's new book, Free Culture, which was published simultaneously by Penguin and free online as a PDF file. After publication a group of random interested people decided to create an audio version of the book.
How has all this affected sales of the book? No one really knows yet although it looks successful. However:
Lessig makes the point in Free Culture that easing up on copyright control would result in more creativity. AKMA's audiobook project proved this point clearly and emphatically. Given the legal right to do so, people will build upon a work in unforeseen creative ways. More concisely than any argument within the pages of Free Culture, the audiobook illustrates exactly how much our society loves to create and how impoverished we are when copyright stops this productivity.As AKMA says, "It confirms what Prof. Lessig argues: that there's great positive potential for a culture in which works flourish apart from the throttling constriction of corporate eternal, universal copyright control."
So what does this mean to people who aren't creators:
Of course, you could have come this far and now be thinking 'But, I'm not a writer, I'm not a novelist. How on earth does this affect me?'.Well, if you read books, you're affected by this. If you watch films, you're affected. TV. Radio. All media is affected by this. Trouble is, when the effect in question, the harm, is a matter of what's missing - the work that is not created because the difficulty of clearing rights prevents it - it is harder to measure and quantify. You can't miss what you've never had.
"This is what's so wrong about the view that says 'asking permission is simple'," says Lessig, "because the reality is that clearing rights as such an extraordinary hassle, that most people would never even think of doing it. So that's why making clear the freedoms that are associated with the content first is a great way to get people to participate, and when they do they begin to recognise why the existing system is flawed."
Suw Charman has more good stuff to say in this longish post so go read and ponder.
Timothy Wu has a really long but reportedly really good (I haven't read it all yet) paper on Copyright's Communication Policy which begins:
There is something for everyone to dislike about early twenty-first century copyright. Owners of content say that newer and better technologies have made it easy to pirate. Easy copying, they say, threatens the basic incentive to create new works; new rights and remedies are needed to restore the balance. Academic critics instead complain that a growing copyright give content owners dangerous levels of control over expressive works. In one version of this argument, this growth threatens the creativity and progress that copyright is supposed to foster; in another, it represents an "enclosure movement" that threatens basic freedoms of expression. Copyright, these critics argue, has wandered beyond its proper boundaries. They contend that the balance must be restored.What all these arguments have in common is a focus on copyright's "authorship" function. Copyright policy, in this view, is fundamentally about providing a balance of incentives for authors to effectuate one of several possible goals, such as progress of science, democratic governance, or the sytem of free expression. Few disagree that these are the goals: the main disagreement is over what means serve these ends.
And, finally, Mark Lemley discusses Ex Ante versus Ex Post Justifications for Intellectual Property:
The traditional theory of IP is that the prospect of future reward provides an ex ante incentive to innovate. An increasingly common justification for longer and more powerful IP rights is ex post - that IP will be "managed" most efficiently if control is consolidated in a single owner. This argument is made, for example, in the prospect and rent dissipation literature in patent law, in justifications for expansive rights of publicity, and in defense of the Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Taken to an extreme, this argument justifies perpetual protection with no real exceptions. Those who rely on this theory take the idea of IP as "property" too seriously, and reason that since individual pieces of property are perpetually managed, IP should be too. But IP isn't just like real property; indeed, it gives IP owners control over what others do with their real property. The ex post justification is strikingly anti-market. We would never say today that the market for paper clips would be "efficiently managed" if put into the hands of a single firm. We rely on competition to do that for us. But that is exactly what the ex post theory would do.Posted by dcoates at May 25, 2004 02:02 PM