Free Culture: Property
Fri Apr 29 2005 11:03 MDT #On our recent trip up to Denver I picked up a copy of Standford law professor Lawrence Lessig's latest book Free Culture (it's online for you to read, licensed under a Creative Commons licence.)
I've just gotten to Chapter 10, "Property" which covers a lot of ground on the history of property, much of it stuff you know but don't think of even when thinking about IP. The big point for me was from the constitution, which codifies Intellectual Property as a second class kind of property, requiring government compensation for any seizure of actual property, while not only requiring no compensation for removal IP rights but also requiring such rights be term limited. It also only allows congress to grant IP rights to promote progress, not for any other reason.
A very different kind of right indeed, and something the publishing houses of all stripes would rather we do not think of. And they've succeed at that. They've also extended copyrights term over and over from a mandatory registration for 14 years + a 14 year renewal to an automatic copyright for the life of the author plus seventy years (95 years for corporate authors). And with the advent of digital media, where every use of IP is a copy, they've expanded their powers to control who can use what, on what device , for how long, and what usage. Things they never controlled with a books, but completely control with PDFs, DVDs, etc.
It is a vast power grab, and one our government is not addressing. And the people are a not, yet, outraged about. This needs to change.
And Everyone should read this book