Lawrence Lessig has updated his ideas on copyright reform, but there's a problem: They don't take into account a profound demographic shift in the way people use online media.
In a Wall Street Journal essay adapted from his upcoming book Remix, Lessig states the obvious: U.S. copyright law is broken beyond repair and needs to be overhauled. But unlike his Stanford colleague Zohar Efroni who believes that current models for performance and reproduction need to shift to focus on user access, Lessig feels that the laws governing reproduction, remixing, and performances need to be loosened to allow for a greater range of uses and creativity.
Lessig has five specific proposals for reforming copyright law:
- Allowing amateur remixes, like the YouTube video of a baby dancing to a Prince song
- Shifting the focus from "copying" to "uses"
- Simplifying the legislation for use by the everyman
- Making the enforcement of the law and the duration of copyright more efficient
- "[decriminalizing] Gen-X."
Lessig had me until the last part. He claims that cracking down on file-sharing is an impossible dream, and feels the recording industry should simply find another way to make sure artists get paid for their work, possibly something like the current structure in China. In attributing the culture of file-sharing and piracy to Gen-X rather than Gen-Y, Lessig reveals that he doesn't seem to understand why piracy is so common, and how the culture of growing up online has impacted the views of an industry still stuck in the days of LPs.
It's clear that copyright law and enforcement of it has to change but Lessig's proposal doesn't seem much more in touch with the climate than what currently exists.
Image of Lawrence Lessig by Robert Scoble. Used under Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0.
Copyright is not broken, the way in which it is applied is broken. The principles of copyright have withstood the test of time for more than 300 years. These principles are sound and fair and older than the U.S. Constitution. Copyright simply took a detour with the advent of digital media and the Internet. It will right itself. It became impractical (if not impossible) for people to comply with and for content owners to enforce. At iCopyright, we advocate ONE simple proposal, not five: make ALL content instantly licensable at the user's point-of-contact with the content. Whether the content is on the owner's site or an aggregator site, one should be able to obtain the rights to use it, share it, or mix it with a few clicks. Because experience shows that if that right is not present, or if it is not easy, people will simply cut-and-paste it anyway. The trick is to grant instant rights and permissions -- for free or for a fee depending upon how it will be used -- while giving the owner credit and a way to monetize those reuses. That's what we are focused on. It seems to be working, iCopyright processes more than 10,000 instant licenses to use/share/mix content every day.
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