Internet liberation theology

In "The Future of Ideas" Lawrence Lessig explains why ham-handed efforts to increase copyright protection are a threat to freedom and prosperity.

By Marc Rotenberg

Nov. 7, 2001 | A generation ago, a communications scholar named Ithiel de Sola Pool wrote "Technologies of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age." Pool's book, which quickly became required reading in graduate seminars, predicted a future of interconnected computers. Pool imagined a world where government would no longer license carriage, as it did with the telephone companies, or content, as it did with the broadcasters. The world of networked computers would become the platform for new forms of commerce and new types of publication.

Pool also predicted that established players would resist this change. They would turn to market power, existing laws and new theories of copyright to protect their vested interests. Government officials, even with the best of intentions, would also gum up the works with outdated policies and an inability to understand change. The future would be delayed, Pool warned, if the regulators and the regulated had their way.

Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor, picks up this story of the present resisting the future in "The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World," a highly readable and deeply engaging sequel to his "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace." In "The Future of Ideas," Lessig, who is perhaps most famous for his brief tenure as a court-appointed "special master" in the Microsoft antitrust trial, also sees dominant players exercising control through the law, technical standards and political might to resist the change that might otherwise take place.

But unlike de Sola Pool, Lessig has seen a better future, which turns out also to be our recent past. He urges the Internet generation not to forget what made the last 10 years exciting: an open platform that did not discriminate among applications or content, an environment for creativity and innovation, a public commons for an information age. In a word: the Internet. And instead of calling for the removal of regulation to encourage freedom, he recommends that there is a place for some regulation, if we want to preserve liberty.

In "The Future of Ideas" Lessig argues that future prosperity is impossible without the freedom to innovate -- but that freedom is under attack by vested interests. Lessig's effort to bind innovation to prosperity is as big an idea, perhaps, as Adam Smith's rebuke to the mercantilists in "The Wealth of Nations." Although free-market capitalists look to Smith as their intellectual fountainhead, Smith was not battling the yet-to-be-born Karl Marx in the latter part of the 18th century. He took aim at those who believed that a nation's prosperity could be measured by the gold it acquired. Prosperity, Smith reasoned, was an ongoing process.

Lessig offers a similar insight about the information economy at the turn of the 21st century. Prosperity requires progress and progress requires innovation. But while some intellectual property theorists and the shareholders of Disney may favor the extension of intellectual property rights into the infinite future, the long-term impact of an economic system that piles high property rights, while burying the intellectual commons that makes progress possible, could be that all new forms of production grind to a halt.

Which may actually be the aim of the major media companies. Copyright law, for example, has become the silly putty of media attorneys and Washington lobbyists, stretched in space and time to protect all manner of activity, including business techniques and technological protocols that were probably not the kinds of things initially envisioned by the framers of copyright law. The original purpose of copyright law, to promote publication, has apparently been lost in the rush to the courthouse, or to Geneva, where the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) continues to extend property claims to ever more forms of innovations.

Of course, copyright isn't the only domain in which the networking giants of today seek control. They also seek mastery of the pipes through which digital information flows. Unlike the common carriers -- railways, telephone companies and others -- who took all comers on a nondiscriminatory basis, the providers of new communications services may be less inclined to connect you to the Web sites of their competitors, or sell you their products. Or maybe their own Web pages will simply be easier to find.

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