Free Culture

I spent today at the National Press Club debate between Lawrence Lessig and James DeLong.
Lessig (Napster, pirate, bolshie, airy fairy academic) was promoting his new book, Free Culture, whilst DeLong (right-wing property rights, corporate litigator) was launching a digital property website.

Both speakers were entertaining, witty and informative - and the lunch was scrummy. They seemed to agree on assumptions (that private property rights are crucial) and desires (innovation and creativity), but whilst Lessig is highly suspicious of regulation which prevents creativity, DeLong fears the loss of incentives.

Why it's important
If you read a book, or give it to someone else to read, you're not infringing copyright law since you're not copying it. In 1976 a radical change in the copyright law meant that copyright status was automatically granted, and therefore in order to use material you had find the copyright holder, and ask for permission. The reason for this was to protect intellectual property from companies who otherwise might make commercial success from distributing works.
The internet has made replication cheap, easy, and digitally perfect. Now, if I read sometihng online (and save it to my hard drive) or send it to someone else to read, I am indeed making a copy, and therefore am required to find the copyright holder, and ask for permission.

Common Sense revolts
Common law held that property rights for land extended to the heavens. A farming family called the Causby's sued aircraft for using 'their' airspace. The Judge threw the case out, claiming "common sense revolts" - imagine if every airline had to secure permission from every piece of land below their flight path! The Causby's did receive a ruling regarding the noise, however, which was causing their chickens to fly into walls.
So the special interests were defeated for the common good, and a major restruction of the notion of 'property' was embraced.

Free Culture
Free culture is like free speech. It doesn't mean culture is available without paying, it means its 'free' in that there are few limits to innovation. Lessig provides the example that 98% of books produced since 1923 are now out of print. DeLong (approximately) says "without strong copyrights there's no incentive to resurrect them." Lessig (probably) says "you're assuming its costless to track down the copyright holder, and buy the rights." His solution is to say that 14 years after printing, unless the copyright owner pays $1 the work becomes 'public'. The influence of Ronald Coase shines through! The barrier of high transaction costs means that old film literally disppears, without being digitally stored.
And Tullock too - Lessig pointed out how the squeeling of corporations is to protect their business models (and profits) from new, more efficient, more creative challenges.
It is the proper pursuit of economists to notice this divergence between the voices we hear, and the good of the economoy as a whole. It's why we're unpopular, but in this regard there seems to be growing public support.

Academia
I'm still unsure as to why Lessig's plans for the creative commons differ substantially from present academia. Based upon solid property rights a system of norms have arisen for referencing and citations which means academics actively publish their works in as much of a 'public' sense as possible. Personally, I will get creative commons licenses for my fables and romance stories, but I don't see the need for my economics - the architecture is already in place.

Winner: Lessig, by engulfment!

Comments

[wyska]

It's an interesting issue and one that is certainly flavour of the month at the moment. My own vision of the future is that copies of documents or files will no longer be held physically on a storage device such as a hard disk or CD. When the power of networks and remote access increase sufficiently, the world will only need one master copy of anything, be it a book, an article, a song or a film. Clients will only have read access to a file, but they will be able to access it from anywhere, at any time, along with another 6bn people.

This would pretty much end the music industries woes because everyone has to pay to access the music, it can't be shared or copied between people. And a band (or film director or author) could write something, record it and put it on their server immediately for the world to listen to(or watch or read).

It's a long way off, and probably a little Utopian, but I like it.

[SL]

"Centralised" information sounds wonderful - but when will it happen? Not yet. Look around my office, people find the "email paradigm" far easier to work with - instead of saving "master copies" and work on the same files on a shared networked drive, they edit and re-send work as attachments by email in an ad hoc manner. Many people prefer this mode of working to the "filing cabinet" metaphor and file their work away in terms of email+attachments. There are little differences in costs between the two paradigms because bandwidth and storage are both cheap.

The likes of Oracle, SAP and PeopleSoft are trying to change that paradigm, by creating centralised data-structures, but will they succeed?

[AJE]

Lessig gave the example of MP3.com - you burn your cd collection onto a file there, and can access it from wherever. It was closed by litigation - lawyers protecting their busness models. So I think a large barrier to 'centralised information' is companies trying to protect existing methods.
Of course its consumers who'll decide how it ends, but I think its inevitable.
For example iTunes - increasingly it'll become cheaper to pay a subsciption and play songs from their massive database, rather than pay 99cents to save a song on your own hardrive.

[wyska]

Very true. For these ideas to become commonplace, the whole culture has got to change. But once the big companies realise the savings to be made by taking this approach (and the dominance they'll establish over piracy) it's bound to become more mainstream.

My other theory is to do with the hardware and software used to access the data. This will have to become much more limited and less open to customisation by the general public. This already exists in the hardware market to a large extent, but less so in the software market. And is it something that the public will embrace?

[AJE]

Lets not forget that we're now engaged in"Centralised" information - instead of myself, Steve and Wyska sending emails between each other, comments appear in a central 'file' which we all can access and view/append.

[wyska]

Oh, when will people learn?

[SL]

I think it's 1-0 to wyska & AJE - it looks like the new Google email service, GMail, is going to use clever algorithms to store forwarded/duplicated emails just once, centrally. Users will effectively haev one gig of storage space, but not actually taking up that amount of physical hard drive space!