Lessons in Lessignomics

Ars Tech takes to task those scoundrels who would criticise St Lessig , but makes a very interesting point in the process:

....the Progress and Freedom Foundation is stirring dull roots with spring rain, unleashing a fresh attack on Lessig's four-year-old book Free Culture in a paper released Monday by senior fellow Thomas Sydnor. The argument itself is frankly bizarre: Sydnor brands Lessig's views on copyright as a species of "quasi-socialist utopianism," and he peppers his critique with breathless invocations of Soviet dictatorship and Orwellian panopticons. But the piece also provides potent testament to a fissure within the contemporary right, as Lessig's ideas find a friendly audience among some libertarian public intellectuals, leaving the content industry with a shrinking stable of credible defenders.

Its probably wise to avoid anything that has words like "panopticon

Actually, having read most of Lawrence Lessig's stuff, I think he is in the main correct and has done a tremendous job, though the accusation of a certain amount of Utopianism is not entirely unfair, he definitely has a viewpoint - but to Lessig's credit he does tend to examine every issue in great depth. Anyway, that's not the interesting bit - its the fissures referred to that is interesting, as they note at the end of their piece:

....the debates over intellectual property in the digital era are creating a second divide within the free-market camp, between corporate interests and the libertarian intellectuals and pundits who have so often provided the theoretical support for business-friendly policies. If libertarians, as Lessig puts it, "start to defect" from a strong-IP stance, copyright incumbents may be left with only their wholly-owned-subsidiaries as defenders.

This is quite insightful, and it implies a re-alignment of the Politico-Economic plates. And that in itself is interesting. In our workshops on Digital IP issues (one of Broadsight's team, Paul Lancefield, is an expert on IP and Patents) we do go into the history of IP, and one of the lessons from history is that IP typically follows the shifts in society - ie it lags reality. Thus I think this schism - and noting also the waves of DRM receding and the first stirrings of a review of the US Patents system - indicates that we are now possibly seeing the high watermark of the Draconian IP Lobby, and the Turning of the Tide.

However, in all seriousness, this is exactly when one needs to say to the other side, the "Free Societals" that its time to "hold on" - because pendulums tend to overshoot both ways, and I do think some of the proponents of Free IP are not exactly into IP freedom as a humanitarian exercise, but into Free (as in costs nothing) for their own self interest. Just as we are seeing a schism in the defenders of IP, its not clear to me that their opponents are all pursuing the same benign objectives as Mr Lessig.

The "Free IP" lobby do also need to have answers to issues their own viewpoints raise.

We need to consider our past experience - the Tragedy of the Commons is something that plagues humanity still in some arenas (most Green issues are Tragi-common issues), so its not a great idea to increase it.

In addition, abolishing nearly all IP protection will-he nill-he is akin to rescinding large amounts of helpful social capital we have built up, painfully, over the centuries - or in the vernacular, it would be akin to a giant looting spree (no doubt to lock up again into other closed receptacles, a la Google Books) unless managed quite carefully.

Thus I think we need to ask the Lessig activists (by that term I mean the "FreeTards", the more - um - enthusiastic? supporters) to answer the following question - "have you actually thought through the consequences if all created content is forever unprotected?".

And I don't want to see answers couched in psychobabble, Gift economics, New Economics 2.0 and other various politico-economic flavours whether libertarian, or discredited socialist / humanitarian ideals re-treaded. I want to see it discussed in terms of hard headed behavioural economics, in terms of what people really do, not what they say they will do. I want to see it in terms of business models where I can see the money flowing without the "and here a miracle occurs" phase in the flow, or the "3-pot-shuffle-it'll be-alright-on-the-night" assurances. I want to see the game theory that shows me why people will do what we think they will do.

Now, I am well aware that taking this line will make me seem like another capitalist lackey - thats not it, I just want to ensure the pendulum hits a happy medium - ie we design a damped rather than underdamped system. It strikes me that this is an issue that does need airing, rationally, because the future of content will be driven by its own basic economics, and most specifically, the risk and rewards - ie the opportunity cost - of creating it.

I want a future world with great content, and I don't mind paying (a fair price) for it. What I don't want is a world with completely free, Ad sponsored, crap content. I've seen commercial TV, and its not something to be proud of - but nor is just ripping it off and sticking it up on YouTube

(Update - I feel in a way that I treated Mr Lessig himself unfairly in this article - he after all is trying to do some very good things with the Creative Commons etc - which we use on Broadstuff - what I am more concerned about are some of the other interest groups riding on the coat-tails.

In fact, he wrote a short response to these articles over here, and I'd like to quote one of the comments as it adds nuance to my thoughts - from gurdonark:

Having read a number of critiques of Creative Commons and, now, Free Culture, from the left and the right,
I'm amused that what I view as a fundamentally moderate position draws such extreme invective.

One point is simple. There is nothing particularly radical about a voluntary movement by creators to donate work into a Creative Commons through use of liberal licensing within current copyright law. Those who choose not to so license are not affected by any disadvantage, except that arguable disadvantage that people who donate photos and music may depress the market for sellers of the same creative material.

Similarly, the injection of research and otherwise patentable ideas into the public domain is as old as academic research institutions. There is nothing particularly "Lessig" about this practice--all you've done, in collaboration with others, is point out its virtues in an analytical context as a "science commons".

The second point for which you advocate is only slightly more novel--the idea that extensions in protected terms and artificial extensions in what is protectible may, in the long run, be disadvantageous to all. This is a viewpoint not at all inspired by any Soviet, or, indeed, any utopian pastoral anarchy. What is the "payoff" as a rhetoric device in portraying your idea as a particularly "left" dialectic? Similarly, when Creative Commons comes under fire from the "open source" movement for being offering people to utilize licenses in the existing copyright regimes to ensure certain protections, it's hard to see you or CC as pawns of government exploitation of freedom of information.

I do not wish to overthrow all IP laws, as I think they can and do serve a valuable function. I'd like to see them reformed around the edges (e.g., an end to Mickey Mouse copyright term extensions and a different patent examination/re-examination process, as well as relief on fair use clarity). In the main, though, CC licenses is a way to achieve a "velvet revolution" in which a dedicated body of creators, scientists, and audience create a new set of publicly useful ideas in a liberalized version of "permission culture".

I get disappointed when I read extreme takes on your work, because there is a legitimate debate about the
proper boundaries of IP law to be had. I also get disappointed because there is a legitimate cultural movement to create this Creative Commons underway, and distortions advance neither the cause of the proponents nor the cause of the critics. One can argue that creators should not license CC--it's a perfectly reasonable argument to make. But that argument is centered in the real-world of daily life more than in the dream world of 1920s left/right polemic.

I think Mr Lessig's core issue is how to be a moderate revolutionary, a tough gig to pull off - ask Lenin .)