Against Copyright Creep
Lawrence Lessig nails the core problem with the Google Book Search deal. A few weeks ago, Lessig was interviewed for the show On The Media on NPR. He tells the story of taking his daughter to hospital and doing some research on what might be wrong with her…
And I got to the critical point in the article where they had a table that was going to tell me whether I needed to worry or not. And when I looked to where the table was, there was a little passage that said, the rights holder has not authorized the reproduction of this table in this digital form.
His point is just because you can license every single part of a written work doesn’t mean you should. He quotes Peter Drucker “There’s nothing so bad as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
Being selective and discrete is not something we as a species are good at, but he does offer a solution or two.
[We need to] think about what the balance should be between free access to culture and metered access to culture, because both extremes are mistakes, either the extreme that says everything is free because then lots of people won’t create because they can’t cover their cost of creating, or the regime that says everything needs to be licensed, because in that world there’s a whole range of creativity – think of kids producing stuff on YouTube – that can’t begin to happen because the cost of negotiating and clearing those rights is just so extreme.
That sounds about right to me. I highly recommend you listen to this segment. It is by far the best explanation I have seen of why regular people should be against this settlement.
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