Lawrence Lessig On Hollywood's Attack On Fair Use

Richard Koman writes: "Tim O'Reilly and I interviewed cyberspace lawyer Lawrence Lessig about the law and P2P for O'Reilly's OpenP2P site. He makes some great points about the legal and investment climate for P2P (the RIAA's goal is to "guarantee that no venture capitalist invests money in new modes of distribution unless Hollywood signs off") and the full-bore attack on fair use in the DeCSS case (the DMCA says "you cannot crack copyright protection schemes even if your purpose is to allow you to have fair use of the underlying material.")" I disagree a bit with Lessig's statement on the second page about why we don't have book licenses - I think it's because the legal system refused to enforce them, not because the book industry thought it was futile. But overall it's definitely a good read.

Comments

Here's the key point

[mav[LAG]]

From the article:

But now the real danger is that the recording industry has succeeded in its objective, which as Hillary Rosen (president and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America) said, is to guarantee that no venture capitalist invests money in new modes of distribution unless Hollywood signs off.

This is the guts of it. Media companies don't like the potential that new technologies have for distributing content (and excluding them from the supply chain). So what's their strategy been? Armies of lawsuits to make sure that a) anyone with a good idea has to waste their time defending a legal case and b) anyone who wants to fund a good idea won't - because they don't want to get involved in a legal case.

Ironically, the most dangerous and subversive tools are the ones written by individuals or small teams with zero funding - Gnutella, OpenNAP and Freenet.

My take on copyright

[PhilHibbs]

Copyright is a bargain struck between society and content producers. It places certain restrictions our natural ability to share ideas, in return for certain guarantees about what we can do, and a time limitation on what we can't (and don't start me on that one). One of the things we can do is make certain "fair uses" of the material, such as personal copies, excerpts, parodies, etc.

Here's the good bit:

If a content provider takes steps to ensure that I cannot do some of the things that copyright says I can do, then that sends a clear signal that the content producer does not want copyright law to apply to their product. There are consequences to that decision. They may put copyright notices on it, but that's like putting a "This is a duck" sticker on your dog. I ain't gonna throw it no bread.