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

Why would a publisher ever agree to this? I suspect his publisher reasoned like this: There are two groups of people out there: (1) those who will buy Cory's book whether or not it's on the Internet, and (2) those who may never hear of Cory's book, if it isn't made available for free on the Internet. Some part of (1) will download Cory's book instead of buying it. Call them bad-(1)s. Some part of (2) will download Cory's book, like it, and then decide to buy it. Call them (2)-goods. If there are more (2)-goods than bad-(1)s, the strategy of releasing Cory's book free on-line will probably increase sales of Cory's book.

Indeed, the experience of his publisher clearly supports that conclusion. The book's first printing was exhausted months before the publisher had expected. This first novel of a science fiction author was a total success.

The idea that free content might increase the value of nonfree content was confirmed by the experience of another author. Peter Wayner, who wrote a book about the free software movement titled Free for All, made an electronic version of his book free on-line under a Creative Commons license after the book went out of print. He then monitored used book store prices for the book. As predicted, as the number of downloads increased, the used book price for his book increased, as well.

These are examples of using the Commons to better spread proprietary content. I believe that is a wonderful and common use of the Commons. There are others who use Creative Commons licenses for other reasons. Many who use the "sampling license" do so because anything else would be hypocritical. The sampling license says that others are free, for commercial or noncommercial purposes, to sample content from the licensed work; they are just not free to make full copies of the licensed work available to others. This is consistent with their own art--they, too, sample from others. Because the legal costs of sampling are so high (Walter Leaphart, manager of the rap group Public Enemy, which was born sampling the music of others, has stated that he does not "allow" Public Enemy to sample anymore, because the legal costs are so high2), these artists release into the creative environment content that others can build upon, so that their form of creativity might grow.

Finally, there are many who mark their content with a Creative Commons license just because they want to express to others the importance of balance in this debate. If you just go along with the system as it is, you are effectively saying you believe in the "All Rights Reserved" model. Good for you, but many do not. Many believe that however appropriate that rule is for Hollywood and freaks, it is not an appropriate description of how most creators view the rights associated with their content. The Creative Commons license expresses this notion of "Some Rights Reserved," and gives many the chance to say it to others.

In the first six months of the Creative Commons experiment, over 1 million objects were licensed with these free-culture licenses. The next step is partnerships with middleware content providers to help them build into their technologies simple ways for users to mark their content with Creative Commons freedoms. Then the next step is to watch and celebrate creators who build content based upon content set free.

These are first steps to rebuilding a public domain. They are not mere arguments; they are action. Building a public domain is the first step to showing people how important that domain is to creativity and innovation. Creative Commons relies upon voluntary steps to achieve this rebuilding. They will lead to a world in which more than voluntary steps are possible.

Creative Commons is just one example of voluntary efforts by individuals and creators to change the mix of rights that now govern the creative field. The project does not compete with copyright; it complements it. Its aim is not to defeat the rights of authors, but to make it easier for authors and creators to exercise their rights more flexibly and cheaply. That difference, we believe, will enable creativity to spread more easily.

THEM, SOON

We will not reclaim a free culture by individual action alone. It will also take important reforms of laws. We have a long way to go before the politicians will listen to these ideas and implement these reforms. But that also means that we have time to build awareness around the changes that we need.

In this chapter, I outline five kinds of changes: four that are general, and one that's specific to the most heated battle of the day, music. Each is a step, not an end. But any of these steps would carry us a long way to our end.

1. More Formalities

If you buy a house, you have to record the sale in a deed. If you buy land upon which to build a house, you have to record the purchase in a deed. If you buy a car, you get a bill of sale and register the car. If you buy an airplane ticket, it has your name on it.

These are all formalities associated with property. They are requirements that we all must bear if we want our property to be protected.

In contrast, under current copyright law, you automatically get a copyright, regardless of whether you comply with any formality. You don't have to register. You don't even have to mark your content. The default is control, and "formalities" are banished.

Why?

As I suggested in chapter 10, the motivation to abolish formalities was a good one. In the world before digital technologies, formalities imposed a burden on copyright holders without much benefit. Thus, it was progress when the law relaxed the formal requirements that a copyright owner must bear to protect and secure his work. Those formalities were getting in the way.

But the Internet changes all this. Formalities today need not be a burden. Rather, the world without formalities is the world that burdens creativity. Today, there is no simple way to know who owns what, or with whom one must deal in order to use or build upon the creative work of others. There are no records, there is no system to trace-- there is no simple way to know how to get permission. Yet given the massive increase in the scope of copyright's rule, getting permission is a necessary step for any work that builds upon our past. And thus, the lack of formalities forces many into silence where they otherwise could speak.

The law should therefore change this requirement1--but it should not change it by going back to the old, broken system. We should require formalities, but we should establish a system that will create the incentives to minimize the burden of these formalities.

The important formalities are three: marking copyrighted work, registering copyrights, and renewing the claim to copyright. Traditionally, the first of these three was something the copyright owner did; the second two were something the government did. But a revised system of formalities would banish the government from the process, except for the sole purpose of approving standards developed by others.

REGISTRATION AND RENEWAL

Under the old system, a copyright owner had to file a registration with the Copyright Office to register or renew a copyright. When filing that registration, the copyright owner paid a fee. As with most government agencies, the Copyright Office had little incentive to minimize the burden of registration; it also had little incentive to minimize the fee. And as the Copyright Office is not a main target of government policy- making, the office has historically been terribly underfunded. Thus, when people who know something about the process hear this idea about formalities, their first reaction is panic--nothing could be worse than forcing people to deal with the mess that is the Copyright Office.

Yet it is always astonishing to me that we, who come from a tradition of extraordinary innovation in governmental design, can no longer think innovatively about how governmental functions can be designed. Just because there is a public purpose to a government role, it doesn't follow that the government must actually administer the role. Instead, we should be creating incentives for private parties to serve the public, subject to standards that the government sets.

In the context of registration, one obvious model is the Internet. There are at least 32 million Web sites registered around the world. Domain name owners for these Web sites have to pay a fee to keep their registration alive. In the main top-level domains (.com, .org, .net), there is a central registry. The actual registrations are, however, performed by many competing registrars. That competition drives the cost of registering down, and more importantly, it drives the ease with which registration occurs up.

We should adopt a similar model for the registration and renewal of copyrights. The Copyright Office may well serve as the central registry, but it should not be in the registrar business. Instead, it should establish a database, and a set of standards for registrars. It should approve registrars that meet its standards. Those registrars would then compete with one another to deliver the cheapest and simplest systems for registering and renewing copyrights. That competition would substantially lower the burden of this formality--while producing a database of registrations that would facilitate the licensing of content.

MARKING

It used to be that the failure to include a copyright notice on a creative work meant that the copyright was forfeited. That was a harsh punishment for failing to comply with a regulatory rule--akin to imposing the death penalty for a parking ticket in the world of creative rights. Here again, there is no reason that a marking requirement needs to be enforced in this way. And more importantly, there is no reason a marking requirement needs to be enforced uniformly across all media.

The aim of marking is to signal to the public that this work is copyrighted and that the author wants to enforce his rights. The mark also makes it easy to locate a copyright owner to secure permission to use the work.

One of the problems the copyright system confronted early on was that different copyrighted works had to be differently marked. It wasn't clear how or where a statue was to be marked, or a record, or a film. A new marking requirement could solve these problems by recognizing the differences in media, and by allowing the system of marking to evolve as technologies enable it to. The system could enable a special signal from the failure to mark--not the loss of the copyright, but the loss of the right to punish someone for failing to get permission first.

Let's start with the last point. If a copyright owner allows his work to be published without a copyright notice, the consequence of that failure need not be that the copyright is lost. The consequence could instead be that anyone has the right to use this work, until the copyright owner complains and demonstrates that it is his work and he doesn't give permission.2 The meaning of an unmarked work would therefore be "use unless someone complains." If someone does complain, then the obligation would be to stop using the work in any new work from then on though no penalty would attach for existing uses. This would create a strong incentive for copyright owners to mark their work.

That in turn raises the question about how work should best be marked. Here again, the system needs to adjust as the technologies evolve. The best way to ensure that the system evolves is to limit the Copyright Office's role to that of approving standards for marking content that have