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Thursday, February 7, 2008
REVIEW OF "Free", Lawrence Lessig's
A film based on a copyrighted novel must get the permission of the copyright holder. A song in the opening credits requires the permission of the artist performing the song. These are ordinary and reasonable limits on the creative process, made necessary by a system of copyright law. Without such a system, we would not have anything close to the creativity.
Posters on a wall in a dorm room, a can of Coke held by the “cigarette smoking man,” an advertisement on a truck in the background. These too are creative works. In the understanding of this revolution and of the creativity it has induced, we systematically miss the role of a crucially important part. We therefore don’t even notice as this part disappears or, more important, is removed. Blind to its effect, we don’t watch for its demise.
The promise of many-to-many communication that defined the early Internet will be replaced by a reality of many, many ways to buy things and many, many ways to select among what is offered. What gets offered will be just what fits within the current model of the concentrated systems of distribution.
Yet there are elements of this future that we can fairly imagine. They are the consequences of falling costs, and hence falling barriers to creativity. The most dramatic are the changes in the costs of distribution; but just as important are the changes in the costs of production. Both are the consequences of going digital: digital technologies create and replicate reality much more efficiently than non digital technology does. This will mean a world of change.
And not just for those who would create something “totally new,” if such an idea is even possible. Think about the ads from Apple Computer urging that “consumers” do more than simply consume:
Rip, mix, burn, Apple instructs.
After all, it’s your music.
Blog writers, digital artists and music mixers are strictly consumers of Internet services as they took ideas and stuff from internet to recreate it in different form to sell it.
Over the past hundred years, much of the heat in political argument has been about which system for controlling resources—the state or the market—works best. The Cold War was a battle of just this sort. The socialist East placed its faith in the government to allocate and regulate resources; the free-market west placed its faith in the market for allocating or regulating resources. The struggle was between the state and the market. The question was which system works best. That war is over. For most resources, most of the time, the market trumps the state. There are exceptions, of course, and dissenters still. But if the twentieth century taught us one lesson, it is the dominance of private over state ordering.
So deep is the rhetoric of control within our culture that whenever one says a resource is “free,” most believe that a price is being quoted—free, that is, as in zero cost. But “free” has a much more fundamental meaning—in French, libre rather than gratis, or for us non–French speakers, and as the philosopher of our age and founder of the Free Software Foundation Richard Stallman puts it, “free, not in the sense of free beer, but free in the sense of free speech.”12 A resource is “free” if (1) one can use it without the permission of anyone else; or (2) the permission one needs is granted neutrally.
So understood, the question for our generation will be not whether the market or the state should control a resource, but whether that resource should remain free. But how a resource is produced says nothing about how access to that resource is granted. Production is different from consumption. And while the ordinary and sensible rule for most goods is the “pay me this for that” model of the local convenience store, a second’s reflection reveals that there is a wide range of resources that we make available in a completely different way. Always and everywhere, free resources have been crucial to innovation and creativity; that without them, creativity is crippled. In a free society, the burden of justification should fall on him who would defend systems of control.
Features of the architecture—both legal and technical—that originally created this environment of free creativity are now being changed. They are being changed in ways that will reintroduce the very barriers that the Internet originally removed. These barriers, however, don’t have the neutral justification that the constraints of real-space economics do.15 If there are constraints here, it is simply because we are building them in. And as I will argue, there are strong reasons why many are trying to rebuild these constraints: they will enable these existing and powerful interests to protect themselves from the competitive threat the Internet represents. The old, in other words, is bending the Net to protect itself against the new.
Posters on a wall in a dorm room, a can of Coke held by the “cigarette smoking man,” an advertisement on a truck in the background. These too are creative works. In the understanding of this revolution and of the creativity it has induced, we systematically miss the role of a crucially important part. We therefore don’t even notice as this part disappears or, more important, is removed. Blind to its effect, we don’t watch for its demise.
The promise of many-to-many communication that defined the early Internet will be replaced by a reality of many, many ways to buy things and many, many ways to select among what is offered. What gets offered will be just what fits within the current model of the concentrated systems of distribution.
Yet there are elements of this future that we can fairly imagine. They are the consequences of falling costs, and hence falling barriers to creativity. The most dramatic are the changes in the costs of distribution; but just as important are the changes in the costs of production. Both are the consequences of going digital: digital technologies create and replicate reality much more efficiently than non digital technology does. This will mean a world of change.
And not just for those who would create something “totally new,” if such an idea is even possible. Think about the ads from Apple Computer urging that “consumers” do more than simply consume:
Rip, mix, burn, Apple instructs.
After all, it’s your music.
Blog writers, digital artists and music mixers are strictly consumers of Internet services as they took ideas and stuff from internet to recreate it in different form to sell it.
Over the past hundred years, much of the heat in political argument has been about which system for controlling resources—the state or the market—works best. The Cold War was a battle of just this sort. The socialist East placed its faith in the government to allocate and regulate resources; the free-market west placed its faith in the market for allocating or regulating resources. The struggle was between the state and the market. The question was which system works best. That war is over. For most resources, most of the time, the market trumps the state. There are exceptions, of course, and dissenters still. But if the twentieth century taught us one lesson, it is the dominance of private over state ordering.
So deep is the rhetoric of control within our culture that whenever one says a resource is “free,” most believe that a price is being quoted—free, that is, as in zero cost. But “free” has a much more fundamental meaning—in French, libre rather than gratis, or for us non–French speakers, and as the philosopher of our age and founder of the Free Software Foundation Richard Stallman puts it, “free, not in the sense of free beer, but free in the sense of free speech.”12 A resource is “free” if (1) one can use it without the permission of anyone else; or (2) the permission one needs is granted neutrally.
So understood, the question for our generation will be not whether the market or the state should control a resource, but whether that resource should remain free. But how a resource is produced says nothing about how access to that resource is granted. Production is different from consumption. And while the ordinary and sensible rule for most goods is the “pay me this for that” model of the local convenience store, a second’s reflection reveals that there is a wide range of resources that we make available in a completely different way. Always and everywhere, free resources have been crucial to innovation and creativity; that without them, creativity is crippled. In a free society, the burden of justification should fall on him who would defend systems of control.
Features of the architecture—both legal and technical—that originally created this environment of free creativity are now being changed. They are being changed in ways that will reintroduce the very barriers that the Internet originally removed. These barriers, however, don’t have the neutral justification that the constraints of real-space economics do.15 If there are constraints here, it is simply because we are building them in. And as I will argue, there are strong reasons why many are trying to rebuild these constraints: they will enable these existing and powerful interests to protect themselves from the competitive threat the Internet represents. The old, in other words, is bending the Net to protect itself against the new.
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