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.