Lessig on the Future of the Public Domain

hank writes "The O'Reilly Network is running an interview with Lawrence Lessig -- author of "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" and "The Future of Ideas" -- on the future of the public domain, reaction to his calls to arms, and his next venture, Creative Commons, "machinery to build licenses that allow people to mark their content as available in any number of ways to the public domain.""

Comments

Re:Is it *that* bad?

[Seth Finkelstein]

See the chart of:

The Growth Rate of the Public Domain

This chart is a visual representation of amici's understanding of the decline of the growth of public domain as a result of repeated copyright term extensions.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Creative commons as licensing infrastructure

[zavyman]

Lessig has an interesting take on public domain, in that it is quite similar to the whole watermarking / DRM scheme.

That's why in one sense we're pushing to advance the public domain, but as a compromise position we're also pushing to enable people to make their work available in the public domain in an extremely easy way. So we're going to build machinery to build licenses that allow people to mark their content as available in any number of ways to the public domain, so that search engines can find and link to that content, and people can easily get it and understand the terms under which they're getting it.

This idea should sound familiar. This strikes me as a scheme quite similar to Digital Rights Management, but in a different direction. Instead of restricting the distribution of content, this technological measure would allow anyone to readily identify the license of a particular work.

Let's face it, small-time writers, musicians, and artists do not want to see their works used inappropriately in a commercial setting (and maybe not even inappropriately in a noncommercial setting), but they might want to allow individuals to share their respective works. This scheme would allow people to mark that situation so that anyone with the file could readily understand the author's wishes.

But, if this licensing scheme is put into wide use, it makes it trivial to implement a DRM management system that disallowed copying of files tagged with a restrictive license. So you have to ask yourselves, is the aforementioned benefit of marking your works as copyable or not in a commercial or noncommercial setting worth it if it means that all commercial music will tag themselves as commercial and noncopyable?

Million Mouse March!

[jparp]

If the Eldred case fails,
we should all dress up like Mickey Mouse and stage a protest in Washington.

That would get media and public attention, plus, we would all be violating copyright law!

Overlooking a key point....

[coyote-san]

You're overlooking a key point here.

The problem isn't that the RIAA and MPAA want to make it impossible to copy their product, it's that they want to make it impossible to copy *ANY* product because their schemes implicitly assume that all "legitimate" files are under their umbrella.

That's nonsense. I think we all have friends with their own bands - the RIAA proposals would make it impossible for them to share their own music. We all have friends with young children, the MPAA would make it impossible for them to share video footage with friends. It would make it impossible for older kids to put together video domentaries for "what I did this summer."

If the RIAA actually succeeded in making it impossible to copy their product, provided that it didn't interfere with other legitimate copies, I would cheer. I would see this as bringing us one day closer to a day when real diversity returns to the music store and airwaves because the non-RIAA players could get their voices heard.

But the current proposals would lock in the RIAA and the MPAA as THE arbitrators of their respective arts in this country. If you don't sign a deal with a major label under terms even worse than today, you would be forced to live in the technological gutter. On countercultural-friendly college campus it may become cool to go analog, but everywhere else it would be an insurmountable barrier.