Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig had some interesting things to say about the negative effects of copyright law at this week's Darklight Digital Film Festival.
See the Wired News article by Karlin Lillington: Why Copyright Laws Hurt Culture .
Copyright laws in the United States are placing the control of material into an increasingly "fixed and concentrated" group of corporate hands, he said. Five record companies now control 85 percent of music distribution, for example.
Because copyright law now also precludes "derivative use" of copyright material, people cannot develop new material based on copyrighted work without permission. Lessig said this radically changes how human culture will evolve, since "the property owner has control over how that subsequent culture is built."
This restriction also stymies technological innovation, as developers cannot follow the long-established practice of taking existing code and enhancing it to produce something new, he said.
"...Digital production and the Internet could change all this, so that creative action and the distribution of these arts could be achieved in a much more diversified way than before," Lessig said. This would allow for a "production of culture that doesn't depend on a narrow set of images of what culture should be."
A more open business model in which artists have greater control over their productions would create "diverse, competitive industries" rather than centralized, monopolistic companies, he said.
New technologies such as peer-to-peer-based communication and file-exchange programs could force a new look at copyright laws and profoundly change the methods of distribution, Barlow and Lessig both said.Posted by Lisa at November 27, 2001 09:24 AM | TrackBack