Amateur Megalomania

Lawrence Lessig, a Professor of Law at Stanford, has an article in Wired magazine addressing copyright extensions in the United States, linked here. I can’t recall a recent article more in dire need of a good Fisking.

But in the interest of pointing out another view, go over to In The Agora before reading onward.

Lessig displays the usual disdain for the idea of private ownership of creative works.

This New Year’s Day, a wonderful thing will happen in Europe that won’t occur again in the US until 2019: Copyrights on music and television recordings will expire. After a half century of monopoly protection granted artists in exchange for their creative work, the public will get its justly earned free access to an extraordinary range of both famous and forgotten creativity. Libraries, archives, and even other creators can spread and build upon this creativity without asking permission first. Songs from 1953 that seniors across Europe wooed their first loves to can be streamed across the Net for free.

First, how has the public ‘justly’ earned free access to this material? Copyrighted material is owned by someone, and that copyright preserves the value of the copyrighted material by forcing others to compensate the owner for any use of said material. Just as I own my house or car, I own any copyrighted material I may create. If the public has the ability to ‘justly’ earn free access to my possession, then by the same logic, should the public have a similar right to access my material possessions after a certain amount of time has passed?

The public has adequate access to these copyrighted materials today. The public PAYS for them. ‘Libraries, archives and even other creators’ already can spread and build upon this creativity – they simply have to negotiate rights with the owner. How can the denial of the right of ownership ever be seen as a justified thing?

Such a yearly event doesn’t happen in the US anymore because Congress repeatedly extends the term of existing copyrights. The last extension in 1998 – the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act – was the 11th for existing works in 40 years, delaying any copyrighted song from entering the public domain for another 20 years. This practice is now inspiring copycats in Europe to similar plunder. Sir Cliff Richard – the most successful singles artist in British history – has launched a campaign in the EU to extend the term of copyright for sound recordings from 50 years to 95. Billions will be wiped from the books of European record companies, Richard warns, if governments don’t act immediately.

Plunder? Only in the warped mind of a California Leftist can the rentention of property rights be considered plundering from the public. This betrays what I think is an undeniable motivation behind those that seek to strip copyrights, or engage in mass file sharing on the net – namely the mindset that the public grants private ownership as a concious act, and the default status of any item of value is public ownership. Private control seems to be regarded as a transient artifact of need, namely the need to promote creativity by enabling the compensation of creators. People like Lessig seek to reduce the level of the compensation by limiting the period of ownership, and the reduction seems arbitrary at that. Which party is engaged in plunder?

…Thus the pirates of the public domain are back, arguing that the EU must lengthen its copyrights to harmonize with those of the US.

Again, I am simply amazed at the reversal of terms. Those seeking to preserve ownership are considered theives, while those that wish to strip ownership are considred the rightful owners. The old Pravda would be hard pressed to do better.

This spiral will not end until governments recall a simple lesson: Monopolies are evil, even if they are a necessary evil. We rightfully grant the monopoly called copyright to inspire new creative work. But once that work has been created, there is no public justification for extending its term. The public has already paid. Term extension is just double billing. Any wealth it creates for copyright holders is swamped by the wealth the public loses in lower costs and wider access.

While the evil of a monopoly is worthy of a completely different post on the subject (and I plan on one later), I’d like to understand how one can promote creativity without establishing a right of ownership of a created work (as in a monopoly). I would submit that the current term of copyright is arbitrary, and a term extension is about as meaningful as the initial term established by law. I fail to understand the utility of public domain in the first place. If Lessig dies, shouldn’t his existing copyrights be extended to his estate or heirs? Just as his tangible property, if properly willed, passes to his heirs, copyrights should follow the same pattern. Again, the assertion of the lost public wealth is further indication of the inherent position that the public is the default owner of all things.

The urge to extend terms for commercially valuable work is understandable, albeit from the public’s perspective, senseless.

Care to explain why? Or is Lessig fundamentally opposed to anything that forces the public to pay for access? I guess there is an indignity in having to pay for what he thinks the public already owns.

But the way that governments extend these terms is even more senseless. Rather than limiting this corporate welfare to those works that are commercially exploited (leaving the forgotten to pass into the public domain so libraries and archives can make them available cheaply), governments uniformly extend the duration of copyrights indiscriminately. The Sonny Bono Act, for example, extended terms for works from as far back as 1923, even though, as Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer estimated in Eldred v. Ashcroft, 98 percent of the oldest works are no longer commercially available.

Again, ‘corporate welfare’ betrays his thoughts. Who is empowered to determine commercial viability? The government? Why not the actual OWNER of the item in question? Should we not be free to make our own decisions over our property? Lessig continues to make use of the word ‘free’ or ‘cheaply’ in terms of access. I would be much more comfortable if he would be honest about his argument, focusing not on the access to copyrighted materials, but instead come out and say that he objects to having to pay people for their labor.

Unfortunately, people like Lessig are rarely so honest about their true motivations.

Lessig represents a growing breed of reinvigorated anti-capitalists, people who would be found uttering such banalities as ‘you can’t, like, own the land, man’ back in the Sixties. This neo-antedeluvian movement has found a new home in communities such as file sharers, Open Source proponents, and the CopyLeft movement. They seek to destroy the foundations of intellectual property, either through wanton trading of digital materials without regard to licensing, or to institute a new ideology of ‘idealistic cooperation’. From the CopyLeft site linked above:

As one person put it, “Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.” For the Open Source movement, non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the Free Software movement, non-free software is a social problem and free software is the solution.

The Open Source and Free Software bunch have produced admirable things like Apache or Linux, and those products were freely released by the creators. They have that right, and I have no problem with the free exercise of one’s right to give away free labor. I do, however, have to question the practicality of an ideology that demands uncompensated labor for the sake of community.

I believe, generally speaking, that Free Software people fall into two camps. They are either comfortably employed programmers who do this as a hobby, or they are students (or unemployed) hoping to burnish their skills and/or seek a reputation to eventually transmute into a well paying job. Otherwise, how does a Free Software producer expect to feed his family? One might ask why we don’t apply the Free Software model to ‘tangible’ goods like food or cars. The inevitable answer betrays what I believe is a more insidious goal behind the erosion of intellectual property rights – namely the idea that intellectual property is inherently ‘un-ownable’. Whether this is a conscious thing is something I can’t answer, but the potential damage can be significant.

A common thread running through these movements is a general disdain for capitalism. Music traders moan about the ‘rape’ at the hands of the evil Record Labels. Movie traders complain about the ‘ridiculous’ salaries of movie stars. Open Source folks love to trash the ultimate Satan that is Bill Gates and Micro$oft. The root of these complaints is disguised in terms such as ‘stifling innovation’, or ‘doing the musician a favor by increasing his exposure’. Never mind that no one has the right to dispose of another’s property without permission, these complaints barely conceal the core belief that profit is a bad thing. They seek to devalue intellectual property through their actions, and in light of the ongoing transition of the American economy, such devaluation can be incredibly damaging.

Our economy has long been in transition from an Economy of Manufacturing to an Economy of Ideas. American creativity is quickly becoming our major Competitive Advantage in the World Economy, and it is vital that we preserve the value of intellectual property. Without this protection, the very foundation of the new economy is eroded. I wonder how many of our best and brightest would devote their lives to something if the product of their labor would never be protected from casual plunder by the Public Domain. How many Free Software people embraced computer science because of the promise of a decent career and compensation? Sure, there will always be a small group of True Believers, willing to live in the Modern Commune, seeking the support of like minded Anarcho-Communists, but we don’t rely on the social conscious of the grocer to stock the shelves for our benefit. The most effective solutions to any problem are those that involve profit.

Take a good look at this guy –

This is the dark heart of the movement, and you can read the manifesto here

Summary: Main theses which will be defended in this paper:
1. Information cannot be possesed . It is not property since it cannot be taken away.It is object nor energy , but essentially form.
2.Every form of treating information as a product is intrinsically contradictory to its very nature.
3.Copyright protection is not only based on an epistemological lie, but it is also immoral towards society as well as it is a reactionary reflex towards capitalisation of thought.
4.Composers, authors nor inventors need protection since the use of their work is not an attack, but contrarywise it rather constitutes an honour.
5.Regardless any ideological considerations , the further development of new technologies will make the idea of copyright completely anachronistic and obsolete. Copyright protection will reveal itself to be just inefficient.

With regards to item four above, I wonder if he considers it an honor to starve so that others may freely benefit from your efforts? A war was fought in the 1860s over something that sounds suspiciously familiar.

The Digital Age is a difficult challenge for the copyright system, but it is vitally important that we continue to seek ways to protect intellectual property. When technology provided desktop means to effectively counterfeit currency, we didn’t seek to excuse it as unpreventable. Devaluation of intellectual property poses as fundamental a threat to our new economy as counterfeiting or fraud, and while enforcement will continue to be a problem, the very act should at the very least carry a significant social stigma. The heart of our system rests on the fundamental right of each person to negotiate the terms of exchange for his labor, and any abridgement of that right, through piracy or plunder, erodes our society.

Unfortunately, many seem to see that as a positive result rather than a problem.

Filed under: Copyright