Have I ever mentioned that I love Larry Lessig?

He begins with a sanctimonious quote from Jack Valenti. Morals, democracy, integrity. All being corrupted by sharing. Sharing has introduced a moral decay.

Lessigs says: In 1923, you could renew your copyright for another 28 years. Over 80% of copyright holders did not renew their copyrights. In 1998, works from 1923 were to pass into the public domain (because of the copyright extensions after 1923). 98% of the protected work were sitting unavailable because they were out of print in one way or another; copyright wasn’t protecting those works so much as making them invisible. This is the pain point Lessig keeps returning to. (I think it’s one level of concreteness short of being an argument that works on a broader audience. That audience will ask: “Why do I care about the 98% of crap that wasn’t good enough to be kept in print?”)

He reminds us that Steamboat Willy (the first incarnation of Mickey Mouse^TM;) appropriated Steamboat Bill, Jr., a Buster Keaton film. (The Keaton film is still a funny, by the way.) This was the beginning of what Lessig would like us to think of as “Walt Disney Creativity,” which we should celebrate: the appropriate and re-expression of popular culture.

Lessig says that we struck a deal with creators that would allow works to pass into the public domain. This deal has been violated, a betrayal fronted by Jack Valenti. The 2% of works still available were protected at the expense of the 98%.

Copyright was created to protect authors but in an era of media concentration, it protects publishers. Further, it homogenizes the culture. “We have never in our history have had a time when fewer inerests have controlled more of the creative process.” Does it make sense for creators, Larry asks. The Internet made this concentration important for we’ve gone from consumers to creators.

He shows an hysterical video of Bush and Blair singing to one another, created and distributed by Read My Lips — a couple of guys with a computer and a Net connection.

Why don’t we have the freedom that Walt Disney had in 1928?

Larry says we’ve tried to get Congress to fix it. He tried to get the Supreme Court to recognize that his position is the conservative one. We failed, he says. (“No, you didn’t, Larry,” I want to cry out, giving him a big hug.)

He introduces the Creative Commons: “We need something for those who want to reserve some rights. “We need to stop solving for the extreme case and begin to build an architecture that can support this middle.” Creative Commons provides a layer of “reasonable copyright control.”

Tomorrow, Creative Commons will introduce new “versioning” llicenses, including a sampling license, an education license, and a developing nations license that allows poorer countries to build on what other, more affluent societies have built. (Very cool idea.)

We need a way to say “I believe in free.” He says: “The world is not divided between those who believe in all control and those who believe in no control,” and we need to make this clear to Washington.

We need to reclaim this space from the lawyers. “We [lawyers] don’t belong in this space.”

Moving peroration: “We believe in a democratic nation…We believe that only in a nation where people can express themselves freely will people come to understand the truth…” “The honor of our nation has been the honor of free people who can speak about freedom without calling their lawyer.” This freedom is within our fingertips because of our new technology.

In response to a question, Larry says he’s discouraged about legal remedies because Eldred was a clear, obvious and extreme case. If ever copyright was going to be limited, this was it. The battle has to be waged in a place where politicians respond to ideals because they think votes are at stake. But he’s not optimistic about it. (Larry is, after all, the Internet’s most important pessimist^TM;.)

Brewster Kahle is building the world’s largest archive. He’s giving copies of it — hundreds of hard disks — to other cultures to make sure it survives any global unpleasantness. The first is in Egypt.

Those 7 Justices who voted wrong in Eldred represent the common view of copyright. We have to make this clearer to the broad run of citizens.

Categories: Uncategorized dw