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Lawrence Lessig Interview
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Lawrence Lessig is the founder of Creative Commons, an organization that since 2001 has developed licences (cc) that provide legal cover to authors who do not want to restrict the right to copy and distribute their works. Creative Commons and Lawrence Lessig are a worldwide referent of the copyleft, a term coined in opposition to ‘copyright’ by Richard Stallman (programmer, referent of the free programming and operating movement, and creator of GNU/Linux).
On the occasion of the publication of copyfight, the purpose of which is to inform and debate intellectual property and free culture, Oscar Abril Ascaso and Elástico talked to Lawrence Lessig. The following is an extract from that interview.
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What do you think is the difference between the American copyright and the one here in Europe?and which one would you consider is the most fair?
I would have said that if you looked at the American traditions versus the European tradition that I would have liked the American tradition better because it was more self-consciously designed to restrict the reach of monopolies of copyright.But in fact the way the two systems have evolved, the American system has become much more repressive by the concentration of power that it gives to owners of copyright than the European system that continues to give authors significant control over how their copyright gets used. So the systems have in fact inverted in my views in the sense that they are harming or helping the problem. That said, I don’t think that either system is that good giving the change in digital technologies. The fundamental problem is that neither system tries to account for the burden it imposes on a certain type of creativity. So if you are going to sit down and write a novel that does not impose on anybodies work its fine, but you can’t be a fifteen year-old kid and remixing songs from your digital turntable and clear the rights for that remix before you release it which means that you can’t release it in a context that is legal. And if you release it in a context that is illegal as soon as you have made money from it, you will be exposed to the legal liability for the remixes that you have done. Both systems are constructed on those types of premises, I think that both systems are just not yet tuned to the technological opportunities of digital technologies.So as long as America asserts the kind of power that it’s exerting in this context, I am afraid that the Europeans will just go along. So the most important resistance will come from Europe and in some sense that is the biggest hope.
In Spain there is a problem with Creative Commons licenses because if you want to release your music or something to the public but you decide to make money with radio stations, you need to go to the Society of Authors but this guy did not give you this offer, he says that if you take the money than you have to do this with my rules. And these rules did not provide you with a contract for you to release your music free on the internet.
Yes, we have this problem in many countries. Where either collecting societies have the exclusive use to the deals or radio stations in a couple countries have the same type of deal. We think what has to happen first is a lot of education with these traditional rights holders why in some fundamental sense why there isn’t a conflict here. We have been talking to European collecting rights societies telling them, that you should allow us to release content under noncommercial terms because any way you were not trading that content before and we will put wraps in the content back to your collecting rights society for those people who want to make commercial use of it.Hence, it is free advertising for you and as we increase this recognition and then some of those ¨opponents¨ will begin to fade away.
The controversy in reality is that the really only conflict there is in this debate is between people who think that artists should have a choice and the people that think that they don’t. There are collecting rights societies who believe that they should function like a union and believe that we [the union] cannot allow artists to make this choice because it will destroy our union. And there are some who don’t want to give artists choice because it checks their profit like record labels who sign someone for their whole life because it would weaken their power. With of those points I would personally express a disagreement, I believe that artists should be in power to choose and to some extent locally artists will have to play a role in changing the rules.
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What changes in the global balance of power can you envision with for example creative commons conquers the world?
I think what will happen is a much more interesting mix of culture and when that happens no one will think that it has anything to do with creative commons.They will have to think that it will have something to do with how amazingly creative the world is.
In Free Culture you frequently defend that a method would be to tax the internet connection in order to raise money to pay the artists, and you know that in Europe we have a lot of climate of taxes. In Spain there is a lot of crisis about the. . . that people pay for every CD.
So what I describe in Free Culture is a pure system that has two important components. The first is that, whatever tax there is, is has to be at the most efficient place. And it is not what I think CDs are for artists for that; and second that it buys you freedom. The problem with the European system, it provides you with neither of those two; 1. It taxes you at the wrong place 2. It doesn’t even buy you freedom so that the content that you have bought can be on a CD that doesn’t allow you to rip it. So if you get the right by paying this tax, you ought to get the right to be able to certain things with this music. It is what it seems to me as paying for music twice.
Do you think in the future that their will be a majority of artists that have decided to free their music on the internet to make more contact and to get paid from the live music rather than the records?
I am a lawyer here and I know particular examples that I can muster; Can I predict about a industry? No.So Wilco is an example of not only someone who sells more records by releasing content over the internet but it also has fantastic following in the concert world and believe that they are just troubadours and that is there job. But if that works for everybody, I don’t just have a clear sense of.What I do know is that nobody knows what the best model looks like. And that we have to do the same thing that societies have done since the beginning of societies: send out a bunch of experiments and try it and allow people to try it. We should be encouraging that type of experimenting right now rather than rendering it illegal or stigmatizing artists that participate in it;
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A few weeks ago Richard Stallman wrote this beautiful article explaining what would happen if Victor Hugo would be living in a literature patent set of circumstances. Considering that music is a type of algorithm, do you think that music is afraid of the patent system?
If you believed that the patent system is consistent than you might be afraid, but fear not the patent system is not consistent. So there is no danger in an obvious sense that patents will be extended to music, but now in a non-obvious sense they have already been extended to music in the way that patents affect mini files and affect technologies that allow compression. But I wouldn’t think the straight analogy between the way that music functions and the way patents function would lead to a fear that we are going to see patents with music.
I have been thinking that the term Copyleft sounds so much like the opposite of copyright that lots of people get confusedby the term itself that it has become a problem. And about the fact that you have chosen q creative commons name, what do you think about this term?
I think that too much effort is spent schoolmarmishly correcting about how people speak. People should use what words that they think are appropriate. We had to use a different word because not all of our licenses are technically CopyLeft licenses .An attribution license is a free license under the free software definition but it is not a CopyLeft license because it imposes no reciprocal obligation. One of the big problems in this debate is that people don’t recognize that the freedom thatfree software is building and that the freedom that the free culture movement is building is in creative commons is a freedom based upon on top of copyright. I think that both Richard Stallman and I would not say that we would like to see the copyright system abolished. I am not completely convinced that proprietary culture is unethical. I think that proprietary knowledge in the context of science is inherently unethical and you might be compelled to do it because the market says that it’s the only way to publish your book: that is one thing; but to the extent that there is open-access publishing out there, I think that scientists have the obligation to do it. I am not sure about the same thing for a novelist, a musician, a filmmaker, and so as long as copyright laws are properly narrowed there isn’t a harm produced by that kind of proprietary culture. So long as it’s short term, lots of fair use, lots of derivative rights built into it, then it is an addition to the culture and not a subtraction.So, I do oppose anti-copyright movements when by that someone means abolish copyright, but I do embrace anti-copyright movements by which they mean make copyright work according to what its original view of it was to be.
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