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Lawrence Lessig on the fate of copyrights and computer networks in the digital future.

http://www.reason.com/0206/fe.jw.cyberspaces.shtml


June 2002

Cyberspace’s Legal Visionary

Lawrence Lessig on the fate of copyrights and computer networks in the digital future.

Interviewed by Jesse Walker

[...]

Reason: When you were interviewed on Slashdot, you sometimes seemed angry at that site’s community of open-source programmers and advocates. You said they were "political slugs," "pathetically apolitical," and addicted to "irrelevant bickerings." What were you getting at?

Lessig: In a sense I’m trying to shame them into doing something. These people, more than anybody, understand the values built into the Internet. But they are among the least politically active segment of our community, out of libertarianism or just a deep skepticism about the use of government. They just don’t want to pay any attention to it, don’t have any respect for what government does.

If they were to become more politically active, however distasteful that may be to them, that could begin to put a check on what is achievable by others who have no hesitation about being politically active.

Reason: Some of them would argue that they’re active in the form of civil disobedience.

Lessig: In a world where civil disobedience was treated with toleration, that might be a good strategy. But we’re in a world where disobedience is treated with felony convictions. The idea that you are going to get lots of civil disobedience against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is just crazy. You’re going to get lots of prosecutions and people going away to jail. The cost of disobedience has become too high, and I’m not sure it’s a viable strategy anymore. There’s some basic cultural differences here. Many of the people who have great ideas in the Slashdot context about the way to run the world -- if you put them in Washington, they just don’t fit.

Reason: Aren’t you facing the same problem? Some of the proposals in Future are guaranteed to be political non-starters. The chances that Congress is going to adopt five-year renewable copyright terms in this political context are zero.

Lessig: I am not writing because I think it’s likely that policy makers will sit down and figure this stuff out right now. I’m more writing about what I think is true, and hoping that eventually a group of people who have the time to think through it will try to do something about it.

Over 15 or 20 years, the movement that Reagan is associated with got the world to think about policy things differently, through many small chips at taken-for-granted assumptions about the world. So eventually it can happen.

[...]


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