Intellectual Property Laws

Lawrence Lessig's Remix for the Hybrid Economy

Reflecting for a moment over whether or not I may end up breaking copyright laws by posting or scanning different articles or sections from books into here, I remembered an interview I heard on NPR once. There was a guy being interviewed who believed that intellectual property laws are generally silly and inhibit education and the spread of ideas. This sort of connects to the below discussion about the economics of ideas and "crowding in" versus "crowding out". The idea is that in the long run, the free sharing/stealing of ideas will lead to greater innovation/invention than the short term appeal of being able to charge people to share your idea with others.

I suppose it all depends on what one values. If the originator of an idea values its promulgation then he will make his "property" free to share. If he instead values his own college education, he will want to use his idea as a good to be sold in exchange for money which he can use for a purpose altogether unrelated to his idea.

Anyway, turns out the guy I remember being interviewed was Lawrence Lessig, the founder of the website Creative Commons, which I just learned about last semester through my class in Library Research.

Here is a really good excerpt from the interview, in which Lessig discusses how decisions on copyright law are made from a corrupt standpoint, without reasonable economic consideration:

[Prof. LESSIG:] ...I got into this battle when the issue was a statute passed 10 years ago called the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which extended the term for existing copyrights by 20 years. This was the 11th time Congress extended the term of existing copyrights in the last 40 years. And I looked at that and I said, wait a minute. The copyright clause in our Constitution gives Congress the power to create copyrights for a quote "limited time." And if you can extend the time every time it expires, that makes a joke of the concept of a limited time, and more importantly, it makes no sense from the perspective of copyright, which is to create an incentive for people to make something new.

Now what we know about incentives is that they're prospective. No matter what we do, George Gershwin will not produce anything more. So it can't possibly make sense to extend the term of copyright for George Gershwin or for Robert Frost or for the Walt Disney Corporation. It might make sense to make them longer going forward, although I don't think that makes sense either, but it certainly can't make sense to make them go longer backwards. Now...

GROSS: Wait. Can I stop here for a second? But their families, their estates will lose royalty money once the copyright ends.

Prof. LESSIG: Oh, of course. I'm not saying that it doesn't make economic sense to particular people to have a longer monopoly granted by the government, of course. But the question is whether the copyright is creating an incentive to produce something new. That's what copyright is about. It's about a monopoly granted by the government in exchange for the incentive to create something. So once it's already...

GROSS: I thought it was just about giving money to the people who made the work. I never saw it the way you were describing. I didn't know that.

Prof. LESSIG: Yeah. The framing idea behind copyright, and it was strongly resisted by, for example, Jefferson, who was very skeptical of the idea of these monopolies being granted by the government. But when Jefferson and Madison had a long exchange in letters about this, Jefferson accepted Madison's characterization, and Madison's characterization was we need to grant these monopolies to create incentives for people to produce these inventions. That was his real focus but also the same justification applies to copyright.

So we create the incentive, and once we create the incentive, people produce work, and once they produce work, they ought to be compensated for it. But once the work is created, it can't make any sense to extend the term if what you're trying to do is create an incentive as opposed to just pay off rich contributors who have made lots of very prominent contributions to your campaign, and that's the point. What was clear in this battle was that it wasn't that there was good reason on both sides. Indeed, when we took this case to the Supreme Court, there was a brief filed by a bunch of economists, including five Nobel Prize-winning economists, including Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase, James Buchanan, a bunch of conservative economists. And Milton Friedman said he wouldn't sign the brief unless the word "no-brainer" was in the brief somewhere, so clear was it to him that there could be no public benefit from extending the term of an existing copyright that he wanted that point made as plainly as possible to the court.

Well, then, why is Congress doing it? Congress is doing it because of the enormous political influence that money in this system has. And what I recognized a little bit more slowly than it should have taken, but what I recognized about a year ago was that obviously, this was not the only area of public policy where money was having that distorting influence. It hit me when I was, you know, paying attention to Al Gore's film and Al Gore's speeches about global warming, and it struck that if it's not just some esoteric area of public policy like copyright where the affect of money was distorting the outcome, but the most important public policy question we're facing, questions of global warming where money was distorting the public policy response to this problem, then it was time to focus on what is the underlying first problem here, which is the problem of money and its influence on how politics gets done.

And so that's the focus that I shifted to but certainly it was recognizing that in the context of copyright that got me onto this problem.