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COPYRIGHT: Lessig advocates
new law for copyright.
Courtesy Lessig.org |
You can pay $25 for Lawrence
Lessig’s new book. Or you can download it for
free.
What’s the catch? None, according to Lessig,
a law professor who specializes in intellectual property
and is the author of Free Culture: How Big Media
Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and
Control Creativity. A memo Lessig wrote to his
publisher convinced Penguin Books that releasing Free
Culture online actually would increase sales of
hardcover copies. Which may be true: there have been
more than 180,000 downloads—and Penguin is on
its third printing.
Lessig’s bottom line has to do with cannibals
and converts. People who decide not to buy a book because
it’s free online represent the cannibalization
rate. The conversion rate reflects the number of people
who hear about a book because it’s online, but
decide to buy the hardcover because it’s easier
to read than the downloaded version. “If the conversion
rate is greater than the cannibalization rate, then
you sell more books,” Lessig says.
In Lessig’s ideal world, more literary and artistic
works would be in the public domain, copyrights would
be considerably shorter, and digital technologies would
encourage creativity. In 2001, he co-founded Creative
Commons, an online service that allows writers, photographers,
musicians and other creators to tailor their copyright
protections—allowing a song to be copied and redistributed
but not sampled, for example, or permitting an essay
to be republished only if the purpose is noncommercial.
The bottom line: a Creative Commons license yields “some
rights reserved,” not “all rights reserved.”
“Everybody knows about media concentration in
an increasingly small number of firms that control the
pipes and channels through which people get access [to
the public domain],” Lessig says. But he argues,
in his latest book and in person, that it’s even
more significant that a decreasing number of people
own “ever-expansive rights of copyright.”
The result? “What I call free culture is shrinking
as these legal regulations expand.”
Lessig is now watching the progress of a congressional
bill he helped write, the Public Domain Enhancement
Act, which would shorten the copyright period to 50
years (it’s currently the life of the author plus
70 years) and require only a $1 fee to extend that term.
The legislation has the support of Democratic Sen. Patrick
Leahy and Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch. Lessig says he’s
“optimistic” something will come of it.
Just don’t suggest that he try and copyright it.
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