Bruce Springsteen played Fenway Park. I live three doors down from the park, so I set up lawn chairs on our roof, invited some friends over, and listened.
The first sentence is true, the second one false, but that doesn't matter. The point is that in the real world, when you publish something, you make it public, even while reserving some rights: I can listen on my rooftop but I can't record the concert and then sell copies.
Why do we care about artists/writers publishing their work? At one level, it's because we want to be able to buy the Springsteen CD. But, at a macro level it's because the public is constituted to a large degree by the works that are made public. The published works are less like canned goods on a shelf and more like the landscape of a public land: the public land is unthinkable without its landscape.
And it's not even as clearly confined as that. The CDs and books and performances don't make the public. Rather, the effect of the works makes the public. We as a public are constituted by the ideas, moods and rhetoric that ripples out from the works. We want this stuff to transform us so subtly that we forget where the terms came from. Works have their deepest effect when we've forgotten which bound sets of paper and small flat disks they first came from. This is how culture advances. This is how culture is.
So, here's the problem. On the Internet, because its space is purely digital, works are even more definitional of the public than they are in the real world. Yet, because the Internet is digital, we are technically able to more perfectly track the path of works and their effects. If, in the interests of publishers (and to a much smaller extent, the artists) we never let the works affect us implicitly, losing their connection to their original authors, we destroy the new public that is struggling to emerge on the Internet.
For the short-sighted sake of the publishers, we are destroying the public that our works enable.
[Please support the EFF and the Creative Commons.]
Joi blogs his own reflections on this topic. I'm in total agreement. [Joho the Blog]
11:42:43 AM 
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