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.
software protectionism needs to be changed. heres why as a hobbyist i rebuild win 95 and win 98 machines. now its illegal for me to sell a machine i pull out of the trash without buying a new copy of the OS that was paid for when the machine was built. [i resell pentium 2's for 50-75 dollars] this ammounts to microsoft getting paid twice or more for a machine that already has the original software on it. or you can look at graphical or programming software suites average around 500 dollars new in 12-18 months they are obsolete when the newest version comes out, however the older version is still being sold [imho] at an inflated price for years. also if you buy an older version tech support mainly is get the newer version if its even supported. again refer to windows, if i wanted to use win 98 i still have to buy it even though its not supported anymore and the source code is protected so i cant even play with it or use it for innovation and research. ok enough ranting for now
one more pet peeve dvd region codes. in an era of global sales why is it a movie released on dvd in the united states cant be bought and played in europe. on irc i used to talk to a fellow sci-fi fan who was downloading stargate sg1 episodes because in poland sales of the box sets where restricted [he could buy up to season 3 there while season 5 was available here] now before anyone flames me i understand the translation to languages other than english can take time, however if the buyer doesnt mind it being in a foriegn language why should the seller? the answer is corporate greed. kinda like the lord of the rings movie in the first year after it was released there was 3 different dvd's made each adding a little bit more with the extra's why? because the greedy filmmakers wanted to bleed every cent out of the consumer. personally i'll download the vcd watch it then wait till the dvd sets are out for a year or so and the price drops from 79 dollars to a reasonable 14.99 in the sale bin
Here is a link to one opposing viewpoint:
Please note that this is merely a link for the purpose of discussion and should not be taken as a personal endorsement of the viewpoint.
On patent laws, I can't disagree with Lessig - the modern system is bewilderingly complicated, and increasingly used not to protect new innovation, but to bludgeon competitors out of markets. Just take a look at the activities of Rambus for a sterling example.
But on copyright... You can reasonably argue that extending copyright to 95 years from 75 is unwise, but that's not an assault on the core of the copyright system; Mickey Mouse is not the end-all and be-all of creative work. But then to argue that something like Kazaa is being restricted by unjust copyright laws...
...well, yes. There are a great many business models I could have put into place, were I allowed to take other people's creative work and use it without paying them anything. I could set up a TV network that did nothing but played that month's new movies, copied straight from the theater, and do excellent business. But no, I can't do that, because of copyright law. So is there something special about the 'net that makes it "inevitable" that copyright be done away with? Will the economy stumble if people can't freely take what I spend all day working on?
Nah, hasn't happened so far.
What Lessig fails to understand is that he needs to keep complaints about copyright and patent clearly distinct. The patent system is in pretty desperate need of reform; the copyright system is, essentially, workin' pretty well. By conflating the two issues, he's severely weakening his points...