Lawrence Lessig is my hero. Follow the link for an interview with him on Slashdot.
Quotes I liked:
"Innovation always and only happens when the new is protected from the power of the old."
"I like to think of this as the Napster recession. If you plot the stock markets before September 11th, you can see that the crucial court rulings are almost like hinge points where the market bends up or down. The stock prices go up after a favorable ruling for Napster and drop afterwards. It's probably a bit silly to ascribe all of the market's zeitgeist to one company, but the end of Napster is really the biggest roadblock for the personal computer. Until Napster crashed, everyone kept predicting more, bigger and better things for the humming space heaters under the desks." (Peter Wayner, interviewer)
"The problem is protectionists will always think that any problem is caused by imperfections in protectionism, not by the imperfections of protectionism."
"There is a deep cynicism about managed culture, and this is our modern popular culture. A kind of sovietism that worked."
Some intelligent comments from Slashdot regarding the interview:
"Modern copyright laws originate from the French Revolution, where publishers were granted the exclusivity rights we all know about. Publishers, not artists.
How would your boss respond if your business' web page was copyright Rackspace? You'd probably self-host quick (not that I'm saying many don't already, but it shows the difference).
Copyright law is a holdback to when it was highly difficult to publish; in the internet age, it needs to be reconsidered." -by Catiline (.a_krumbach. .at. .yahoo.com.)
"Obviously you're right that some of the dotcom crash was quite necessary and had nothing to do with the Napster ruling. But the point you're forgetting is that the dotcoms started to crash in the spring of 2000, and for a while it was pretty well contained: the dotcoms themselves (mostly just the bad ones) with some collateral damage to Sun and Cisco once they actually started going under in late 2000.
But the huge drop in consumer PC sales and consumer broadband didn't happen until spring 2001--until the Napster decision, almost precisely.
And it makes sense: you take a service that went from 0 people in fall 1999 to IIRC 80 million in spring 2001, many of them buying new computers, new CD burners, and/or broadband connections to use Napster, and then you suddenly take that impetus away, you're going to get a big problem on your hands. Indeed everybody had been saying for years that new computers weren't needed because there was no new killer app...but there *was* a killer app, Napster. Napster is the reason that every computer comes with a CD burner now, and DVD-ROMs are just optional. When I bought my last computer 3.5 years ago, I bought it with a DVD-ROM, because everyone thought they were going to replace CD-ROMs very quickly. But they didn't, and the reasons why were, in 1999, the introduction of the sub-$1000 computer, which kept CD-ROMs standard, and in 2000, Napster, which made CD burners standard.
So, again, the broadband and PC markets dropped in the wake of the Napster decision, like a rock. And of course the most ironic thing is that the music industry's sales did exactly the same thing--they were rising, at a record pace no less, throughout 2000 and Q101...but then, directly after the Napster decision, they turned negative and have plummetted ever since." by ToLu the Happy Furby (dhandelm@nosPaM.fas.harvard.edu)
"If you allow any copyrights at all, then people are always going to try and drive it to it's logical conclusion that we are seeing today. The treatment of copyrights not as an incentive but a property." by argoff
"It would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors... It would be curious... if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody... The exclusive right to invention [is] given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society."
--Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 1813. ME 13:333