Prohibit: Against The Law

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Larry Lessig, founder of Centre for Internet and Society and chair of the Creative Commons project, makes a passionate presentation at TED that discusses more free and less free. In other words, the heart of the issue of copyright and the internet. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, I strongly recommend watching the video.

I cribbed some notes from the presentation. I feel confident that in this case, cribbing is OK.

First, to the business of copyright, Larry argues that we need two types of change: 1) a collection of artists who make their work more freely available and 2) a collection of businesses that thrive in this ecology of freer (freeer?) content. These two changes allow “more free” to compete with “less free.” Competition, to his thinking and mine, is undeniably good.

Less free is the current system of copyright. One example of more free is Creative Commons. The system that maximizes artist income and consumer benefit is the best one.

He calls for business to enable the more-free ecology. For artists who wonder how they get paid, this concept is frighteningly vague. For others, this notion of ‘business enabling more-free’ is either without meaning or holds ill-formed aspirations. He is an idealist. So hard gaps in a plan can be simply filled with wishing.

Second, and to quote him, “much more important,” he discusses the morality of “less free.” Quoting:

We made mixed tapes, [our kids] remix music. We watched TV, they make TV. It is technology that has made them different. And as we see what this technology can do, we need to recognize that you can’t kill the instinct the technology produces, we can only criminalize it. We can’t stop our kids from using it, we can only drive it underground. We can’t make our kids passive again, we can only make them “pirates.” And is that good?

We live in this weird time. This kind of age of prohibitions where in many areas of our life, we live life constantly against the law. Ordinary people live life against the law, and that’s what we are doing to our kids. They live life knowing that they live it against the law.

That realization is extraordinarily corrosive. Extraordinarily corrupting.

The presentation of this impassioned argument starts at 17:30.