Doc points to a commentary in the same general area of Lessigness: Ed Foster writes in Infoworld on the spread of end user license agreements to printed material. His example is a book on “Geriatric Care Guidelines” from Omnicare, sent unsolicited to physicians. A label warns you not to open the shrink-wrapping unless you agree with the license which, basically, forbids you from telling anyone what’s in the book.

This is an egregious but not unique example. Lots of printed documents have conditions attached to them. Consulting companies routinely put a footer on every page of their reports that forbid photocopying. And non-disclosure statements routinely preface business documents. We usually don’t feel there’s anything wrong with that, perhaps because the inefficiency of the real world ensures a reasonable leeway: nobody’s going to know if you run off a copy of part of the report to distribute at an internal meeting or if you tell your spouse about the interesting proposal you heard today. In both cases, you’re violating the license, but far from doing any harm, you’re actually furthering the author’s interests — the consulting firm is further entrenched and you have a chance to think out loud about the proposal with someone outside your limited perspective.

The digital world affords the new possibility of zero leeway. The problem with digits is that they’re so simple. That is also their great strength, of course. They’re so simple that they can be tracked perfectly. They’re so simple that we can’t tell just by looking at them whether they are helping an author’s cause or subverting it. So, we are desperately trying to make the mistake of erring on the side of strictness.

Why is this a mistake? Because “Moving my ideas into a purchaser’s head” is only rarely the real intent of a creator. Far more often the intent is much richer than that: to have her ideas make a difference, to be appreciated and even loved for her ideas, to have her ideas start an open-ended process of development. Digits don’t know from that ambiguity. We — by which I mean the distribution industries, the government and even most of us “content creators” — are doggedly trying to reset the default to what is simple and unambiguous. But, defaulting to the simple and the unambiguous is nothing but a definition of stupidity.

What we thought was an undesirable weakness of the real world — its inevitable leeway — in fact is a strength because it accommodates the basic point of communication: to be ambiguous enough in meaning and scope to provoke results, growth and innovation in unpredictable ways.

Besides, didn’t James Bond defeat the evil forces of Omnicare in “You Only Play Once”?

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