Lessig on IP Law, Technology, Blogs, and the Commons

A recording of a Larry Lessig-led session at Bloggercon III. (Recording from ITConversations.) Lots of good things buried in there. (Worth the listen.)

Some Lessig quotes...

The state of today's IP law...

I was once at a conference and somebody made the following analogy that I thought was really brilliant.

Imagine you buy a dining room table. And you decide you don't want to use it as a dining room table anymore. You want to use it as a desk. But before you're allowed to move it into your study and use it as a desk, you've got to call up the maker of the dining room table.

Say, Can I use it as a desk? Can I put an Apple computer on it?

No, no, no. We've got an exclusive deal with Microsoft. It can only be a Microsoft computer that goes on top.

The point is, the way that we think about IP in this context is really bizarre when you think about other property. People don't like talking about it as property, but let's talk about it as property.

If it were property, why can't I do with my property (You know, the CD that I bought.) certain things that I would be able to do with my computer? Right, because it's my property. But the law the way it's structured right now is a very feudal system of law.

IP Law and Blogs...

The problem with that retoric, the thing which Valenti succeeded in doing, is that it simplifies the issues too much.

And so that you think that it's black and white. You're either for property or you're a Communist. Right, so if you resist the existing regime, it's because you believe in anarchy.

Right, and I have been called a Communist and an Anarchist a million different times even though my position is never against copyright never against intellectual property. It's instead for a regime that makes more sense of the existing technology.

That matrix is not such a regime. That matrix may have made sense in 1970, 1980. It may have made sense given the Recording Industry in a time gone by. It doesn't make sense today.

It doesn't make sense for blogs. Right, it doesn't make sense to what blogs could be. And the fact is you're generating an industry of creativity that is inconsistent with that law.

Now you can shut your eyes to it, pretent the law's going to ignore you. And it will ignore you, until it becomes important what you are doing. And then it's going to come in and take its hatchet and shut you down.

Or we can begin to think about how to protect ourselves against that ultimate moment.

A Balanced approach to property...

Think about the Internet. The Internet was an architecture that was a commons. People built on top of it. Nobody owned the protocols. Nobody tried to control it. And we've been fighting people who have been trying to control it.

And that open-commons protocol has induced an extraordinary amount of business that gets built on top of it. Right, and so, I think the point to get people to see is that a world of no property and a world of perfect property, both of those extremes, is less valuable than a world where you've got a proper balance between property and the commons.

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