Control and
Creativity
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/future/excerpts/ to read the piece. Lessig covers the history of copyright, and considers the impact of the new digital technologies on copyright and intellectual property. His take, while not exactly original, is given in clear, understandable language. He discussed the collision between the big media companies and the technology companies. Basically the media companies are fighting a rearguard action to make home computers illegal. The writing has been on the wall for some time now, but the whole issue really only blew up when Napster came on line, and music file swapping became common. The real problem is that the whole technical underpinning that copyright is built on has been destroyed, leaving only legal measures to support it. Added to this, the rapaciousness of the big media companies has destroyed the moral consensus which allowed copyright to function in an unimpeded fashion. Copyright was underpinned by two technical assumptions. First, that the means to publish was too expensive for 'ordinary' people. Second, that copying a work degraded its quality. The first assumption died when the World Wide Web gained widespread popularity. OK, it's not perfect, but it was the first time that -anyone- could publish their own work as and when they wanted without any intervention by the media companies. The second assumption only holds for analogue copying. A digital copy not only does not degrade, but is indistinguishable from the original. The first response of the media companies was to try to restrict access to these technologies to businesses. They weren't, in the first instance, all that unsuccessful. For instance they managed to delay the introduction of affordable Digital Audio Tape (DAT) drives for several years. But ultimately this struggle was doomed by the increasing power and cheapness of the Personal Computer. Add that to dirt cheap CD-writers and the coming cheap DVD-writers and you have, from the point of view of the media companies, an absolute nightmare. Lessig faces these issues squarely. His article is well worth a read, and on the basis of reading it, I for one intend to buy the book!
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