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Larry Lessig
Silicon Valley vs. Hollywood
A Civil War in the Digital World pt2
"Scrapping Copyright Law As We Know It"
(originally found at
Always
On)
AlwaysOn: You were in front of the Supreme Court.
Lessig: Yes, the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, along with other groups, was challenging the Copyright Term Extension Act. For the 11th time in 40 years, Congress extended the term of existing copyrights. This time they extended the copyrights because two percent of the content covered still has commercial value. They wanted to extend the term for that two percent, but they extended it for everything, which means there is an extraordinary amount of content out there which can't be used or cultivated or copied, because you can't identify the copyright owner anymore.
One of the briefs in our case was from the guy who runs Hal
Roach Studios, which has the Laurel and Hardy movies. In essence,
he said, "We make millions of dollars from copyright term extension.
It's the greatest thing in the world for us. But if you don't strike this
law down, a whole generation of American films will disappear because nobody
can clear the copyrights for this old film. It is not one copyright owner;
it is a pile of copyright owners."
There is no registry. Companies dissolve, and often there is no way to find the owner. If we don't remove the copyright, nobody is going to restore this old nitrate-based film, and in 20 years it will literally be gone. He said there is a whole generation of American film that will have turned to dust by the time the copyrights expire.
AlwaysOn: What specifically did you argue before the Court?
Lessig: Simply that when the Constitution says "limited times," that means you shouldn't be allowed to extend the term of the existing copyrights. So you get whatever your term is: life plus 70, life plus 50, or whatever. But that's it. It doesn’t make sense to extend copyrights for everything just to protect the two percent that still has commercial value.
AlwaysOn: You’ve proposed a solution.
Lessig: Yes, a copyright maintenance fee. It’s a very simple procedure: 50 years after you published something, you’d have to file a copyright maintenance fee, say a dollar a year. If you didn’t pay the fee then the work would pass to the public domain, but if you did pay the fee then the copyright would continue. We know from past registration systems that 98 percent of copyright owners would not bother to renew, even for a dollar, because they don't care. So Disney would pay for Mickey Mouse for as long as they wanted, but 98 percent of the stuff would pass to the public domain.
AlwaysOn: The Court case is just one copyright project you’ve been involved in. You recently launched a new organization, Creative Commons. How did that come about?
Lessig: It came about because we live in a world that is divided between two types of extremists. One type thinks that all content has to be perfectly controlled, and the other doesn’t respect any type of rights at all. When the Internet was first born, the architecture supported the no-rights people because basically nothing could be protected. The counter reaction to that is to build an Internet in which all rights get protected all the time. The reality is that most creators live in between, not in the no-rights reserve or the all-rights reserve, but in the some-rights reserve.
AlwaysOn: That fits with what you’ve said before: we have a technology that supports the cut-and- paste culture, but a legal system that rejects the cut-and-paste culture.
Lessig: Exactly. So what Creative Commons is doing is enabling creative people to voluntarily liberate some of the rights associated with their content. Take musicians, for example. Right now there’s no easy way for one musician to say to another: "Yes, you can take content out of my music. You can sample it and even release it for commercial purposes, that's fine, just don't copy my whole song and release it for commercial purposes."
So we came up with a voluntary copyright system. There are now about 400,000 web pages, mine included, with these little Creative Commons tags. A Creative Commons tag has three layers. One is a machine-readable RDF expression of a license that outlines how the content can be used: for non- commercial purposes, or with attribution, or as long as you share and share alike, or with no derivative use, etc. The creator decides.
The second layer of the tag is a human-readable version of the license, which uses icons to very simply express what the permissions are. Finally, there is a legal license that would cost about $50,000 in legal time to construct from scratch—it provides a bulletproof way to license the content. So we’ve put those three layers together into this tag to create a copyright that people can build on and use to liberate more content while still receiving reasonable protection.
AlwaysOn: Is the Founders' Copyright—which Creative Commons just announced—part of this?
Lessig: Yes. The Founders' Copyright is a practical alternative to current copyright options, which keep getting extended. In 1970, there were only two copyright terms: you got 28 years initially, and then if you renewed you got another 28 years. That’s 56 years. But 85 percent of the people never renewed their copyrights, so the average term was just 32 years. But now, copyright law automatically gives individuals a term of life plus 70—your life plus 70 years. It gives corporations a 95-year term. So we’ve gone from 32 years to 95 years. That's dramatically longer.
But most people don't need anything more than 14 years. That’s the term of the Founders' Copyright—14 years, with the option of extending the copyright for another 14 years.
AlwaysOn: Is anyone using the Founders' Copyright yet?
Lessig: Absolutely. O'Reilly & Associates is releasing about 600 of their books under the Founders' Copyright. Now, you say "Of course, what does O’Reilly care after 14 years?" That's exactly the point. If they don't have any reason to be controlling their content after 14 years, why should the content be controlled?