Cannes, France — Oh my.

I mean, seriously, what else
can you say after sitting through one of Stanford University Law
Professor Lawrence Lessig's presentations? The man is an oratorical
genius. I've seen variations on the "read-write culture" presentation
Lessig presented here at MidemNet on several occasions, and I never
fail to be impressed at his almost sorcery-like skills. Of course, the
mystery was hightened this time by the fact that he refused to tell the
Midem organizers in advance what he would be addressing, and he kept
the focus on his presentation, not any holes in his logic, by limiting
Q&A to one question before disappearing from the stage. He was
there and gone so fast it left one wondering if he had been there at
all.

But yes, Virginia, there is a Professor Lessig and he was at
MidemNet, despite the fact that several months ago on his blog he said
he was moving on from the copyright debate and crusading against
"corruption," which from what I can see is whenever someone who doesn't
think like he does participates in the political process. (Corruption
has been a target of academic elites, of course, dating back at least
to Plato; perhaps Lessig likes that wise man's solution and the guru of
digital freedom wants to be our philosopher king?)

For those not
familiar with the presentation, Lessig basically suggests we have lived
in a read-only world (for us non computer geeks, he means a world where
media is one way, like a TV show or sound recording) but the Internet
has given us a read-write world (where I can take clips from that TV
show or sound recording to make my own derivative work.) His thrust is
that copyright law is preventing this read-write culture, and thus
harming the reputation of copyright, which apparently he thinks is
something whose reputation should be preserved. The conclusion is that
we have to abandon copyright to save it. Oversimplistic? Yes, but seek
out the professor and I'm sure he'll direct you to an archived version
of it somewhere online so you can experience it yourself.

The
pitch continues to grate on anyone remotely familiar with copyright,
both its principles and the law. The derivative works he cites are
either (a) legal under fair use, or (b) of questionable legality but
not generally being pursued by rightsholders. He calls these derivative
works producers pirates, or more accurately he says the late Jack
Valenti of MPAA, who Lessig calls "my friend," called them pirates.
Valenti did crusade against unauthorize uploading of motion pictures on
P2P sites, but this is far different from what Lessig is talking about.
I would love to see statistics of (a) the ratio of derivative works
posted to YouTube compared to the number of unauthorized creative works
downloaded from the Internet that same day, and (b) the ratio of
creative works used by these derivative artists to the number of
unauthorized works residing on their hard drives that they are not
using for derivative works.

For therein lies the heart of the
problem with Lessig's argument. The threat to copyright comes not from
a few kids with fancy media-splicing software and a fat broadband pipe.
The threat is from massive infringement (a banner hanging outside the
Palais des Festivals here says that more than 1.2 billion sound
recordings will be illegally downloaded worldwide in just the few days we're
here; that's a bit more than the mash-up videos that will be posted to
YouTube). Just as in his book Free Culture, Lessig quite
articulately spells out some small, isolated example of use that is
hard to argue against, and then extrapolates from there that copyright
enforcement itself is flawed. The models just don't scale.

I
mentioned Lessig always tweaks his presentation slightly to his
audience. This one was very interesting in how it was tweaked. Lessig
defended once again his Creative Commons. I am on record as saying that
if an artist truly knows what he or she is giving up, and they're not
surrendering copyrights shared with others without those artists'
consent, then an artist should feel free to make use of a Creative
Commons license. In practice CC licenses are causing a great deal of
legal confusion, but I champion artists' choice so it would be
hypocritical of me to say an artist shouldn't make this choice, even if
it might be ill-advised.

But rights organizations for music work
a little differently in Europe than in the US. If I'm a songwriter in
the US I can sign with a rights organization and still use CC, as the
PRO is likely a non-exclusive arrangement. That is not the tradition in
Europe; thus CC is viewed as a direct threat, a direct competitior, to
rights organizations here. If I as a European songwriter adopt a CC
license, I've very likely guaranteed that I won't get to benefit from
my local rights organization. That's not good for the organization, and
it's certainly not good for me.

So did Lessig use his normal
examples of music when touting Creative Commons? Did he talk to a hall
filled with music industry officials about how CC works with the music
industry? No. The two CC examples he used were from the photography
industry, neither of them even European photographers.

He's a smart guy, he is. I wish him the best of luck on that whole anti-corruption crusade.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 27th, 2008 at 8:18 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright law, copyright opponents, international, piracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.