FITUG e.V. Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft

Lessig: The Limits Of Copyright

http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,16071,00.html

The Limits of Copyright

Our country's founders put certain intellectual property rights into the Constitution. But they weren't downloading software.

By Lawrence Lessig

John Warnock, founder, chairman and CEO of Adobe Systems (ADBE) , traveled to Capitol Hill this month to testify about the "new economy." His real target, however, was more specific: software piracy and the "disturbing" trend among the news media and academia to present "a false trade-off" between growth and "copyright and patent protections."

Many have worried, Warnock reported, that "overly strong intellectual property protections might have a chilling effect on Internet development." Warnock disagrees, apparently embracing "overly strong" protection. The Internet has flourished, he testified, "not in spite of" but "because of" strong intellectual property protection. Indeed, so important is intellectual property, Warnock (a former academic) lectured the committee, that the framers of our Constitution "placed intellectual property rights in Article I of the Constitution."

Now, I'm a big fan of Adobe. I think PDF, Adobe's portable document format is the greatest thing since sliced spectrum. As a happy user of Microsoft Word, I hate it when others send me documents in some obscure word-processing format. Keep your word processor preferences to yourself! With a PDF, I can read what you write without buying your word processor. (Here's a bit of code that truly ought to be bundled with the operating system.)

But you can love the company, yet hate its politics. Let's talk about the "false trade-off," Professor Warnock, academic to academic. What really is our tradition? Is everyone who questions "overly strong" intellectual property a "pirate"? (If so, then someone owes me an eye patch.) Does calling for balance make one a communist?

...

Zurück