The Future of Ideas
Lawrence Lessig
$30 Random House
IT IS fashionable among those who care about the future of the Internet to talk about "the tragedy of the commons". The reference is to a 1968 essay by ecologist Garrett Hardin, which talked about the problem of allocating scarce resources (the commons) when users acted selfishly rather than cooperatively. The original essay is about a bunch of farmers, some cows and a bit of grazing land, but it applies rather well to the clogging that goes on when millions of people simultaneously try to download, say, the latest 400-page report on the wrongdoings of a US president.
In The Future of Ideas, the commons is the universe of human ideas. Lessig contends that, after a decade of rampant innovation, we are sitting quietly by while the powers that used to be are systematically making good the ground they lost and closing off access to that commons. Entrenched interests in the entertainment industry are gaining control of the means of access to the Net as broadband is rolled out by the cable companies, wireless spectrum is allocated to the highest bidders, and routeing threatens to cease being content-neutral. The upshot, Lessig argues, is a future Internet in which your cable company could favour a selection of its own and its partners' content, slowing or blocking access to alternatives. Lessig limits his discussion to the US, but the threat is the same in Britain.
In a book that is far darker and more pessimistic than Code, Lessig ties into all this the practice of granting patents, instead of copyright protection, to software and business methods. This threatens to make it impossible for any but the largest companies to engage in software development (Europe is reconsidering its position on this subject). The alternative is open-source software that can be inspected and tinkered with by anyone who's interested. Similarly, the legal system has been consistently granting rightsholders increased control. Copyright terms keep being extended: Napster and My.MP3.com have been shut down, and laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act are in force. All serve to further the interests of the now greatly consolidated ranks of a few rightsholders, at the expense of public access.
Which regime did better at spurring innovation, asks Lessig. The tight control that AT&T (and BT) exerted over the telephone network until 1984? Or the open nature of the Internet's design?
It is now clearer that the Net will be turned into an oligopoly, like commercial broadcasting. Rightsholders have been arguing for years that the ease of copying digital media, if left unregulated, will end innovation and creation. Who, they ask, will spend their lives making music for the rest of us if there's no way for them to get paid?
It's the wrong question, and not just because the entertainment industry has rarely paid artists willingly. Lessig asks a better one: given that the freedoms that were designed into the Internet's architecture spawned a massively creative commons of ideas, is it wise to make legal and structural changes that will end those freedoms, just because a few large companies want total control?
newscientist.com |
