bloggedy blog: the personal weblog of a music lover and aging punk wannabe

:: Saturday, March 27, 2004 ::

Free Culture
As soon as I get caught up on my other reading, I'm going to have to get Lawrence Lessig's new book Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. The book is also being made available for free under a Creative Commons license agreement. Akma and some other bloggers are reading chapters from the book to make a free audio version.

A recent post on Dan Hughes 's blog alerted me to the fact that the book is now available. Yesterday while killing time at Anheuser-Busch (no I wasn't imbibing but awaiting an appointment to interview an A-B staffer), I read the Wall Street Journal review of Free Culture (which unfortunately isn't available online to non-subscribers; talk about big media locking down culture). The review by Stewart Baker, a tech lawyer, calls the book "an insightful, entertaining brief for changing our copyright policy." I'm all for that; copyright needs an overhaul.

In his review, Baker points out the hypocrisy of the recording industry, which established itself by stealing intellectual property:
As Mr. Lessig reveals, the recording industry was just another new-age pirate when it began. In a 1906 copyright hearing, Sen. Alfred Kittredge thundered against the new technology: "Imagine the injustice of the thing. A composer writes a song. ... Along comes the phonographic companies ... and deliberately steal the work of the brain of the ocmposer" by, uh, recording it. And Hollywood, that staunch defender of intellectual property, owes its very existence to filmmakers who fled New Jersey -- then the center of the industry -- to escape Thomas Edison's lawsuits over unauthorized use of his patented cameras.

Moreover, while Lessig "aims most of his arguments at people like himself -- standard-issue Howard Dean liberals," he ought to be appealing to conservatives, Baker writes.
Viewed up close, copyright bears little resemblance to the kinds of property that conservatives value. Instead, it looks like a constantly expanding government program run for the benefit of a noisy, well-organized interest group -- like Superfund, say, or dairy subsidies, except that the benefits go not to endangered homeowners or hard-working farmers but to the likes of Barbra Streisand and Eminem.

Meanwhile, in a somewhat related forum, No Rock&Roll Fun has posted a couple of excellent pieces about how the recording industry is trying to sell us on the idea that file-sharing is stealing from the artists -- the likes of Eminem and Streisand, as Baker would say. (See Do as daddy tells you and You just haven't earned it yet, baby.) As someone who has created quite a bit of copyrighted material and tried to make some money off it, I know the artists deserve some of the fruits of their labor. But I also agree with Simon @ No Rock&Roll when he writes: "Remember, when the record labels start to talk about morality, it's like being lectured on happy marriages by Bluebeard."

:: Andrew 11:52 + ::
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