Blogger and Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig may be a leftie, but his much-needed focus on a broken intellectual property system have earned him a high place on our roster of honoured blogs. What follows is excerpted from a recent speech carried in WIRED:
"And finally, let me talk about the economy. There will be no real economic recovery that doesn't begin here. Silicon Valley set the pulse of the last great economic boom. It is the key to reviving that growth again.
Yet we will kill that recovery if we continue our crazy dance with protectionism. Protectionism is competition through government favor rather than merit. It is power used to defeat change. Over the past five years, this valley has suffered protectionism of one sort: intellectual property laws out of touch with their animating purpose. If trends continue, it will suffer something worse."
He continues:
"....noble purposes do not guarantee noble results. And I fear that the ideals that inspired our intellectual property laws - creativity and innovation - have been corrupted by a generation of lobbyists. Copyright law today is an insanely complex set of regulations, written by lawyers, apparently just for lawyers. The same is true for patents. Both make sense for technologies that today live only in museums; neither as crafted makes sense for the technologies of the Internet.
You have seen this effect throughout the Valley. Venture capitalists have been sued by content companies for funding innovative technologies. They therefore fund fewer content-related innovations. Law firms have been sued for defending new technologies. They are therefore hesitant to advise in favor of innovation.
We can do better. Intellectual property is vital to growth. But the law must be fit to technologies, rather than 21st-century technologies being forced to fit 19th-century laws. Copyright and patent laws could be simplified; the rightful and efficient protections they promise could be made much easier to navigate. Their aim should be to encourage competition and innovation. It should never be to protect the old against the new...
...Your silence in the face of that folly is understandable. But your silence will only guarantee that folly prevails. And the consequence of that folly - continued protectionism - will benefit no one. Not the rich, not the poor. Not America, not the world."
It's a timely, and important, warning. Read the whole thing.