Ask Lawrence Lessig About Life And Law Online 218
Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School, and before that of various other places, is one of the best-known voices in the world of electronic freedoms. Lessig's new book, The Future of Ideas, is the latest work of many in his efforts to illuminate and create a freer world online. Lessig has agreed to answer your questions; please be courteous by limiting your questions to one per post.
.NET-enabled futures? (Score:5, Interesting)
DMCA (Score:5, Interesting)
Given the recent court defeats in both the Felten and 2600 cases, do we even have a chance?
International Freedom (Score:5, Interesting)
My question is how much of the above do you disagree with and why? And what body (UN, w3.org, wipo, coporation of ISPs, Microsoft) do you forsee holding the international legal legislatory responsibility for the net at large in 1/5/10/25/50 years time?
AOL-TW & MS (Score:2, Interesting)
(1 question per comment, I know, but everyone else does it)
Activism by coding (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps it would be helpful to have some bright programmers set up some concrete examples for judges to consider, which clarify the problems we all see, and help judges refine their intuitions about code and digital information.
For example, to further the "code is protected speech" cause, we could create a full-fledged programming language which reads as plain English, then use it to implement a copy protection circumvention program (DeCSS or the like). This raises all sort of interesting questions: it's English and code; is it protected under the first amendment? Presumably it was before it could be run as a program, so does my inventing a programming language change the status of existing speech? If it's protected as only source code, is an interpreter for that language illegal? Is bundling the English script with the interpreter illegal? And so forth....
...but that's a very thorny example. Are there examples of this kind that we programmers should be producing -- software that makes these theoretical arguments more concrete? Is there anything in this spirit that won't just confuse and/or piss off a judge? What examples do our causes need? We're ready to implement them!
Cyberspace Amendment (Score:5, Interesting)
--Jim
Will the extension of copyright continue? (Score:5, Interesting)
Or do you think that the public interest will reassert itself and hold or even turn back some of these copyright extensions?
When a work's copyright is extended, one person (the author or the corporation that owns it) benefits. But when its copyright expires, everyone benefits by being able to copy, modify, expand on and extend it. Can we convince lawmakers with this kind of social and economic argument?
100 Years from Now... (Score:4, Interesting)
Since you are such a big figure in the realm of online freedom, where do you *hope* the level of online freedom is in about 2101, and where do you realistically *think* it will be?
Patents, Copyright and the law community (Score:5, Interesting)
Dr. Lessig,
Looking from the outside in on the legal community's response or lack thereof to the constitutionality and legal basis of recent court rulings (Napster, Eric Corley), the DMCA/SSCA, etc, I see very few lawyers taking a stand against this -- there's mostly a massive shrug. There's the ACLU, the EFF of which you're a part, and Jessica Litman, and that's all I see trying to do something about the co-opting of copyright and patent lawmaking by corporations through appeals based on the interest of business, lobbyists' dealmaking, and outright graft. By and large however there seems to be little interest even amongst lawyers and congressmen about the arcana of copyright and patent law, and thus it's left to such companies and libraries because they're the only ones who both have power and care about it. Has trying to fight this caused conflict in your professional work? Is it lonely being a "vox clamantis in deserto"? What's your game plan for beating these guys back, or do you have one? There's a certain sadness and resignation in both your and Litman's writing that's very disencouraging that would lead me to think that even our flag-bearers feel there's little hope at this point.
--Gregory Dyas
IP Laws of the Future (Score:5, Interesting)
Bridging the "Digital Divide"? (Score:2, Interesting)
What can we be doing "officially" to make sure that gap disappears? I know of several organisations that provide computers and technological assistance to the "have-nots", but should the government play a role? And if so, what should that be?
Internet vs. Intellectual Property... Fight! (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you believe that it would be accurate to say that not much money is actually being "lost" to the internet? If so, how would you go about proving this?
Champ or Chump? (Score:4, Interesting)
Ed Felten vs. RIAA (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft settlements? (Score:5, Interesting)
file sharing and copyright law (Score:5, Interesting)
If you think it should not be legal, what remedies should the law consider, since these systems can have significant non-infringing uses as well?
Re:Will the extension of copyright continue? (Score:2, Interesting)
Leverage the knowledge of technical community (Score:5, Interesting)
How can we leverage the knowledge of the community to help educate politicians and the general population in terms of technologies, and the impact of the proposed bills? Briefly, how can we help better, not just sending letters to congress people or senators?
Corporate vs. Individual (Score:2, Interesting)
This is one question, with multiple parts. Some of your defenders have asserted that you are only opposed to Intellectual Property in the hands of corporations. Is this true? Do you favor strong protection for IP produced by individuals as opposed to corporations, or are you opposed to strong IP protection generally?
Also, many people in the AIP movement frequently cite the fact that IP has not been historicly enshrined as a "natural right". However, isn't this just an academic question, important only for lawyers when formulating the basis of the law? After all, we have rights to our physical property, but that doesn't bar the government from confiscating it when such confiscation is deemed to have an overwhelming public benefit. In light of that, why do so many people in the AIP movement feel motivated to make it a point that IP is not a "natural right". My own view on this is that it is simply a rhetorical technique designed to nudge people towards the AIP movement's point of view, but I'd be interested in your take on this.
Finally, what say you to the irony of the fact that if I OCR your book and post it on line I'll get in trouble?
Informational Revolution (Score:3, Interesting)
Due to popular beelifs, do you think that we are going to see a major legal shift in IT rights from business to individuals, similar to the way rights shifted about 100 years ago?
How long "should" IP rights last? Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
Given that intellectual property ownership is justified by the need to provide an incentive to create new ideas, what is your view of the of the appropriate time duration of intellectual property ownership? Lifetime of human inventor/creator? Fixed period of years? Indefinite?
Is there a coherent rationale for duration of ownership other than arbitrary legistlative choice?
Also, does IP ownership serve other goals (have other justifications) besides fostering innovation, that might be met by other means more effectively?
A Common in Scandinavia - The Land (Score:4, Interesting)
Effectively, as I have understood the term "common", the land, or perhaps rather the right to recreation on any land is a common around here.
While this has a very long tradition, the law has come under attack from various groups, often arguing that if no money is invested in preparing recreational areas for people, people will not be able to use the land for recreation.
Would you think that this attitude has some resemblence to the notion that without the labels, no music will be made, as there will be no money to be made from making music?
checks and balances opinion (Score:2, Interesting)
To me it seems that for the majority of my lifetime (Reagan administration - now) has been a time where the United States government has to an increasing degree used the inherent 'checks and balances' in a much more forceful way than perhaps they were intended. To be more specific, congress seems to be passing many more laws at are questionably, and even at times blatantly unconstitutional. The large amount of time involved in judiciary process allows lawmakers to pass such questionionably unconstitutional bills knowing full well that they may only last four to eight years or so.
While this delay may have been less effective in the past, in the "Internet Age" four to eight years is enough to wildly shape emergent technologies and processes to the government's whims (which by extension is the lobbyists' whims in this day and age).
Do you feel that these 'temporary' laws (such as the new anti-terrorism bill, which I believe even has an explicit expiriation date) have a place in modern US government as it is now?
The Demise of Anonymity (Score:4, Interesting)
A lawyer friend tells me that nothing in the US Constitution grants the right to anonymity (as opposed to privacy) and that a means of identifying individuals online is inevitable. That said, do you think the OSS world should preempt efforts such as the SSSCA and provide an open means of positively identifying individuals online? Has it come down to choosing the path to walk vs. being forced down it?
Solutions to Sloppy Legislation? (Score:2, Interesting)
Optimism? (Score:4, Interesting)
The question of harm. (Score:5, Interesting)
The question was one Valenti posed to you. To paraphrase it roughly: "Who cares? I would like someone to explain to me what harm is being done to the world by Mickey Mouse's copyright being extended twenty years. How does that harm anyone's ability to be creative or incentive to be creative."
In the debate you only had the opportunity to present an anecdotal response. (A teacher whose class film projects couldn't be shared due to copyright infringement fears, I think.)
Beyond the anecdote, however, a clear answer would be very helpful. We can all see that the copyright extension bargain was one-sided: copyright holders profited and the public gained nothing. We see the inequity in the action, we sense that the fix was in, and we resent it. But resentment over seeming corruption and the copyright holders' good fortune can only take us so far.
A clear conception of direct harm to the public might be far more persuasive than the secondary harm of the copyright holders getting a really sweet deal. I kept hoping during the debate that the opportunity would come for you to address the question more fully, but it never did.
member ownership? (Score:1, Interesting)
The SCSL, Jini and more recently the Liberty Alliance seem to be somewhat inspired by the member-owned "chaordic" model. What if such a model were applied to Napster? What if participants who added extra value could earn extra rewards? Could such a model decrease legal friction encountered when trying to add value to copyrights?
(btw -- Visa's founder, Dee Hock [fastcompany.com], believes that if member-ownership had been extended to all participants, including merchants and cardholders, Visa would be an $8 trillion business today.)
Re:Will the extension of copyright continue? (Score:2, Interesting)
For example, let's say I hold the copyright on Mickey the Rat. Current law says that I have the copyright for 20 years (I know; this is an example). If I can get licensing fees of 1,000,000 dollars a year, I'll have 20,000,000. If the government reduces the copyright to 10 years, I only get 10,000,000, a loss of 10,000,000 dollars. And we'll assume that all experts in the field agree on that money amount. Should the government pay for costing the person money?
If not, why not? Remember, if the government condemns your house to put a road through, they are supposed to pay you the market value of the property they take.
Online liberties and Justice Scalia (Score:5, Interesting)
Many of your bio-blurbs state that you clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who is the most conservative justice on the current court.
In contrast, your own recently published writings have taken a more liberal or libertarian viewpoint on many issues.
I'm curious to hear about how your time as Scalia's clerk affected your views. What did you learn about civil liberties and technology law while helping to draft opinions for Scalia? Have your views changed since then? If so, why?
The best way to protect the commons. (Score:2, Interesting)