Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig (short story to read .TXT) 📕

My argument just now, however, has nothing to do with whether the changes that are being pushed by the copyright warriors are "justified." My argument is about their effect. For before we get to the question of justification, a hard question that depends a great deal upon your values, we should first ask whether we understand the effect of the changes the content industry wants.

Here's the metaphor that will capture the argument to follow. In 1873, the chemical DDT was first synthesized. In 1948, Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller won the Nobel Prize for his work demonstrating the insecticidal properties of DDT. By the 1950s, the insecticide was widely used around the world to kill disease-carrying pests. It was also used to increase farm production.

No one doubts that killing disease-carrying pests or increasing crop production is a good thing. No one doubts that the work of Müller was important and valuable and probably saved lives, possibly millions.

But in 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, which argued that DDT, whatever its primary benefits, was also having unintended environmental consequences. Birds were losing the ability to reproduce. Whole chains of the ecology were being destroyed.

No one set out to destroy the environment. Paul Müller certainly did not aim to harm any birds. But the effort to solve one set of problems produced another set which, in the view of some, was far worse than the problems that were originally attacked. Or more accurately, the problems DDT caused were worse than the problems it solved, at least when considering the other, more environmentally friendly ways to solve the problems that DDT was meant to solve.

It is to this image precisely that Duke University law professor James Boyle appeals when he argues that we need an "environmentalism" for culture.7 His point, and the point I want to develop in the balance of this chapter, is not that the aims of copyright are flawed. Or that authors should not be paid for their work. Or that music should be given away "for free." The point is that some of the ways in which we might protect authors will have unintended consequences for the cultural environment, much like DDT had for the natural environment. And just as criticism of DDT is not an endorsement of malaria or an attack on farmers, so, too, is criticism of one particular set of regulations protecting copyright not an endorsement of anarchy or an attack on authors. It is an environment of creativity that we seek, and we should be aware of our actions' effects on the environment.

My argument, in the balance of this chapter, tries to map exactly this effect. No doubt the technology of the Internet has had a dramatic effect on the ability of copyright owners to protect their content. But there should also be little doubt that when you add together the changes in copyright law over time, plus the change in technology that the Internet is undergoing just now, the net effect of these changes will not be only that copyrighted work is effectively protected. Also, and generally missed, the net effect of this massive increase in protection will be devastating to the environment for creativity.

In a line: To kill a gnat, we are spraying DDT with consequences for free culture that will be far more devastating than that this gnat will be lost.

Beginnings

America copied English copyright law. Actually, we copied and improved English copyright law. Our Constitution makes the purpose of "creative property" rights clear; its express limitations reinforce the English aim to avoid overly powerful publishers.

The power to establish "creative property" rights is granted to Congress in a way that, for our Constitution, at least, is very odd. Article I, section 8, clause 8 of our Constitution states that:

Congress has the power to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

We can call this the "Progress Clause," for notice what this clause does not say. It does not say Congress has the power to grant "creative property rights." It says that Congress has the power to promote progress. The grant of power is its purpose, and its purpose is a public one, not the purpose of enriching publishers, nor even primarily the purpose of rewarding authors.

The Progress Clause expressly limits the term of copyrights. As we saw in chapter 6, the English limited the term of copyright so as to assure that a few would not exercise disproportionate control over culture by exercising disproportionate control over publishing. We can assume the framers followed the English for a similar purpose. Indeed, unlike the English, the framers reinforced that objective, by requiring that copyrights extend "to Authors" only.

The design of the Progress Clause reflects something about the Constitution's design in general. To avoid a problem, the framers built structure. To prevent the concentrated power of publishers, they built a structure that kept copyrights away from publishers and kept them short. To prevent the concentrated power of a church, they banned the federal government from establishing a church. To prevent concentrating power in the federal government, they built structures to reinforce the power of the states--including the Senate, whose members were at the time selected by the states, and an electoral college, also selected by the states, to select the president. In each case, a structure built checks and balances into the constitutional frame, structured to prevent otherwise inevitable concentrations of power.

I doubt the framers would recognize the regulation we call "copy-right" today. The scope of that regulation is far beyond anything they ever considered. To begin to understand what they did, we need to put our "copyright" in context: We need to see how it has changed in the 210 years since they first struck its design.

Some of these changes come from the law: some in light of changes in technology, and some in light of changes in technology given a particular concentration of market power. In terms of our model, we started here:

We will end here:

Let me explain how.

When the first Congress enacted laws to protect creative property, it faced the same uncertainty about the status of creative property that the English had confronted in 1774. Many states had passed laws protecting creative property, and some believed that these laws simply supplemented common law rights that already protected creative authorship.8 This meant that there was no guaranteed public domain in the United States in 1790. If copyrights were protected by the common law, then there was no simple way to know whether a work published in the United States was controlled or free. Just as in England, this lingering uncertainty would make it hard for publishers to rely upon a public domain to reprint and distribute works.

That uncertainty ended after Congress passed legislation granting copyrights. Because federal law overrides any contrary state law, federal protections for copyrighted works displaced any state law protections. Just as in England the Statute of Anne eventually meant that the copyrights for all English works expired, a federal statute meant that any state copyrights expired as well.

In 1790, Congress enacted the first copyright law. It created a federal copyright and secured that copyright for fourteen years. If the author was alive at the end of that fourteen years, then he could opt to renew the copyright for another fourteen years. If he did not renew the copyright, his work passed into the public domain.

While there were many works created in the United States in the first ten years of the Republic, only 5 percent of the works were actually registered under the federal copyright regime. Of all the work created in the United States both before 1790 and from 1790 through 1800, 95 percent immediately passed into the public domain; the balance would pass into the pubic domain within twenty-eight years at most, and more likely within fourteen years.9

This system of renewal was a crucial part of the American system of copyright. It assured that the maximum terms of copyright would be granted only for works where they were wanted. After the initial term of fourteen years, if it wasn't worth it to an author to renew his copyright, then it wasn't worth it to society to insist on the copyright, either.

Fourteen years may not seem long to us, but for the vast majority of copyright owners at that time, it was long enough: Only a small minority of them renewed their copyright after fourteen years; the balance allowed their work to pass into the public domain.10

Even today, this structure would make sense. Most creative work has an actual commercial life of just a couple of years. Most books fall out of print after one year.11 When that happens, the used books are traded free of copyright regulation. Thus the books are no longer effectively controlled by copyright. The only practical commercial use of the books at that time is to sell the books as used books; that use--because it does not involve publication--is effectively free.

In the first hundred years of the Republic, the term of copyright was changed once. In 1831, the term was increased from a maximum of 28 years to a maximum of 42 by increasing the initial term of copyright from 14 years to 28 years. In the next fifty years of the Republic, the term increased once again. In 1909, Congress extended the renewal term of 14 years to 28 years, setting a maximum term of 56 years.

Then, beginning in 1962, Congress started a practice that has defined copyright law since. Eleven times in the last forty years, Congress has extended the terms of existing copyrights; twice in those forty years, Congress extended the term of future copyrights. Initially, the extensions of existing copyrights were short, a mere one to two years. In 1976, Congress extended all existing copyrights by nineteen years. And in 1998, in the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, Congress extended the term of existing and future copyrights by twenty years.

The effect of these extensions is simply to toll, or delay, the passing of works into the public domain. This latest extension means that the public domain will have been tolled for thirty-nine out of fifty-five years, or 70 percent of the time since 1962. Thus, in the twenty years after the Sonny Bono Act, while one million patents will pass into the public domain, zero copyrights will pass into the public domain by virtue of the expiration of a copyright term.

The effect of these extensions has been exacerbated by another, little-noticed change in the copyright law. Remember I said that the framers established a two-part copyright regime, requiring a copyright owner to renew his copyright after an initial term. The requirement of renewal meant that works that no longer needed copyright protection would pass more quickly into the public domain. The works remaining under protection would be those that had some continuing commercial value.

The United States abandoned this sensible system in 1976. For all works created after 1978, there was only one copyright term--the maximum term. For "natural" authors, that term was life