Slashdot Mirror
The Future of Ideas
Ideas has been reviewed in Salon and in the Washington Monthly; the book has a promotional website as well.
Lessig starts off by looking at the idea of a "commons," a community resource of some sort. The traditional commons is a public park or piece of land, but Lessig is more interested in looking at less-traditional commons on the 'Net and other communications systems. He moves on to examining some of the innovations that have been spurred by the recent growth of the Net -- typically startup companies that have taken advantage of the commons represented by TCP/IP and HTTP to provide a new service or product. If you follow Slashdot religiously, you probably read about most of these companies at least twice -- once when they started offering their innovative new whizbang, and again when they were sued by Megacorp, Inc., and shut down. The final part of Ideas covers the lawsuits, or more precisely the efforts by entrenched players to keep anyone else from playing. The distinction is important, because lawsuits are not the only way to keep upstarts from being able to participate: control of the code is also an important tool. For every control through lawsuits story that Slashdot runs, there's an equivalent story about control through code.
Just as in Code, Lessig is not optimistic about the future. Why should he be? So far, despite every warning, every attempt to sound the alarm, the forces trying to shut down innovation are winning in an utterly convincing fashion. A blurb compares the book to Silent Spring, the famous book about the environmental effects of DDT. Silent Spring was more or less successful -- DDT is now banned for most uses in the U.S., and the book had great effect in raising environmental awareness, but overall, environmental quality has continued to suffer. Lessig's book is not likely to be as successful. Attacking DDT was relatively easy compared to attacking the unlimited expansion of intellectual property, which has many multi-billion dollar companies willing to fight to defend their continued erosion of the public commons.This should suffice to summarize Lessig's book. The ideas in it should not be unfamiliar -- Lessig is hardly the only one espousing this point of view today, though he is one of the most articulate. The final chapters have Lessig's suggestions for ways to reverse this trend of quashing innovation -- different ways of managing the electromagnetic spectrum to produce a better wireless commons (it's worth noting that the unlicensed 2.4 Ghz band has been the source of most recent wireless innovation), ways to create an Internet commons on the wired network (some municipalities are already doing this, laying municipal fiber to the home and following an open access policy), changing copyright law and patent law to put more code in the public domain, changing contract law so that end-users can't be forced to sign away their rights. All are good suggestions. Despite the hopeful notes in parentheses just above, most of these suggestions stand little chance of being adopted any time soon. But perhaps Rachel Carson was looking at much the same uphill battle against DDT.
Ideas is most comparable to The Control Revolution by Andrew Shapiro, an earlier effort to explore the changing dynamics of control on the net. Shapiro was much more optimistic, and writing without much of the recent evidence that Lessig uses to make his point that innovation is being squashed thoroughly. If you will, there is an optimism scale -- John Perry Barlow defines one end of the scale, Shapiro is in the middle, and Lessig occupies the pessimistic side. Smart money is on Lessig.
All in all, it's a fine book. I think I prefer Code though, for a variety of reasons -- I find the central premise of Code to be less obvious, more ground-breaking. Or perhaps I've just read so much about "innovation" during the Microsoft trials that I can never again read the word without wincing. As with Code, Lessig has extensive footnotes, making this a scholarly work (for the scholars) but a perfectly readable book even for non-scholars. In any case, it's strongly recommended.
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-- DDT is now banned for most uses in the U.S., and the book had great effect in raising environmental awareness, but overall, environmental quality has continued to suffer. Lessig's book is not likely to be as successful. Attacking DDT was relatively easy compared to attacking the unlimited expansion of intellectual property, which has many multi-billion dollar companies willing to fight to defend their continued erosion of the public commons.
Well, yeah, Silent Spring *did* raise the problem of DDT and it's gone now. But there had to be *something* to fill in those gaps. Now they are spraying for West Nile Virus mosquitoes up here in the Northeast US and doing far more damage with the pesticides than they are helping. After all, WNV has killed what.. three? five? people. Is it really worth destroying generations of birds and their offspring to save five lives? How many millions die of malpractice?
But back to the topic at hand.. until we get judges who know computers are better for something than product placement in televised courtrooms, or understand something about intellectual copyright itself, there wont be a change. If you dont think that large companies are stealing ideas left right and center, well, wake up. 3m bought the idea for post-it notes for like, 1.99 from the guy who came up with it, due to contractual obligations that almost all of us sign. If you develop code, and use your work computer for even one line of said code, it probably falls under your blanket contract that says your company now owns it, and owns j00 as well.
Until laws like that get challenged, and beaten, companies squelching free development, or the furthering of technology outside their-own pockets are going to continue to be the status quo.
What is the solution? I dont pretend to know.. but getting more technologically savvy people into the courts in judge, jury, and lawyer roles could be a start. Face it, M$ is going to send in the best 10 lawyers they can find, and what does a Mitnick get? Whatever the PD's office can spare.
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
Its obvious that without air you cannot breath. It is also obvious that without a car you cannot drive 100mph on a highway. Writing a book to make these points would be ridiculous.
Yet intellectual monopoly marketing by companies has been so successful, it is not ridiculous to write a book that makes the point that the patent system as we have it today is the tool [used] by entrenched players to keep anyone else from playing.
I'm glad to see this book. Maybe it will wake a few more folks up. I hope so.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
With all these dim views of the future of cyberspace, and current trends do point in that direction, perhaps it is time to start implementing a FreeNet. Something outside of the mainstream Internet, away from corporate and government controls. Something entirely for geeks, by geeks.
In all honesty, I don't see any way around it. When non-Microsoft, non-FBI-bugged operating systems are outlawed, only outlaws will run Linux/BSD/etc.
Your comparison to "Silent Spring" is a pretty good one. We should note, however, that the chemical companies and the US government rallied *hard* against DDT studies that showed it was unsafe. It took something like 10 years for it to be declared unsafe for human exposure. The same goes for CFCs. Studies in the late 70s showed conclusively that they contributed to the ozone holes, but it wasn't until the late 80s that any real action was taken to require companies to lessen their use of them. Again, you had big companies fighting this tooth-and-nail.
The point is, these battles are always hard. The only thing this particular fight has going for it as that creators of content (coders, musicians, filmmakers) also have a vested interest in keeping their products from obscurity.
>>why doesn't he publish his book under the public domain
Probably because he wouldn't be able to find a publisher with the kind of distribution he would want for his book. I talked with Jessica Litman a little bit about "Digital Copyright" and her choices when it came to publishing. She'd be perfectly happy to see the entire work available online, but her publisher wouldn't allow it.
I find it unlikely that Lessig would feel that much differently. He's a lawyer - can't be in too much need of the income. I'd think he would be trying to get the widest distribution possible, to have the greatest number of people exposed to the ideas he's presenting. GNU license for documents (or BSD) would be too limiting for most publishers who deal with mass publications.
Don't just complain - DO something about it!
There's also the fact that many of the resource which universities provide are scarce physical or human resources, which have a cost. So the barriers you refer to at least in part (and probably in large part) exist for pure economic reasons - regulating access to a relatively scarce resource. As you point out, other extra-economic barriers are imposed, such as requiring good high school grades - but the primary reason for this is an attempt, albeit imperfect, to ensure the most productive use of a university's resources.
As some of the knowledege resources become available electronically, some aspect of this equation will change (e.g. the web-based MIT OpenCourseWare). As always with economics in a reasonably free market, things tend to move towards lower cost as they become cheaper to duplicate and therefore less scarce, and certain aspects of educational knowledge are no different.
But the fact is that barriers to accessing information create wealth.
An arguable point, I believe. The question which Lessig addresses centers around the artificial scarcity which is imposed on intellectual "property" by the law. An interesting question is to what extent imposing such artificial scarcity generates real wealth, as opposed to simply redistributing wealth from the consumers to the creators.
The only reason this is not considered a fundamentally unhealthy redistribution of wealth (of the kind that has occasionally occurred in non-capitalist countries), is that an exchange is considered to take place - exchanging licenses to intellectual property, for some other type of asset. One of the main questions at issue is what kinds of rights such an exchange should grant to the licensee, regardless of an individual creator's wishes.
Fair use doctrine was intended to address this, and did so quite successfully, at least from the consumer's perspective. Now, fair use is being undermined both legally and technologically, and consumers are being, or will be, screwed (technical economic term).
The most obvious battle here has nothing to do with destroying wealth - it has to do with maintaining a sensible balance between creators and consumers, that allows both sides to thrive, and neither side to be at the complete mercy of the other. The DMCA and other recent events have shifted the balance too far in favor of the creators, or rather, their agents. This is certainly beyond a workable compromise position, and if that isn't obvious to most people yet, it will become so soon enough.
Nice argument (and I agree with you), but they're going to come right back and point out that you can play DVDs on DVD players, and that DVD players aren't pirate tools, but Linux and BSD are hacker tools, so you must really want to pirate that DVD. No, that isn't a logical argument if you pick it apart, but you don't get to cross-examine the MPAA lawyers -- just their witnesses.
We call it art because we have names for the things we understand.