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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Lessig on Google's Book Search Settlement « Previous | |Next »
August 19, 2009

Lawrence Lessig, the author of Free Culture, gave a talk at the Berkman workshop on the Google book search settlement at the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Stanford University:

The proposed Google Book Search settlement creates the opportunity for unprecedented access by the public, scholars, libraries and others to a digital library containing millions of books assembled by major research libraries. But the settlement is controversial, in large part because this access is limited in major ways.

Instead of being truly open, this new digital library will be controlled by a single company, Google, and a newly created Book Rights Registry consisting of representatives of authors and publishers; it will include millions of so-called “orphan works” that cannot legally be included in any competing digitization and access effort, and it will be available to readers only in the United States.

So we have an example of Lessig's thesis of the tension in intellectual property law between it having been captured in most nations by multinational corporations that are interested in the accumulation of capital versus the free exchange of ideas in the public domain and an innovation commons. The Internet’s very design built a neutral platform upon which the widest range of creators could experiment. The legal architecture surrounding it protected this free space so that culture and information–the ideas of our era–could flow freely and inspire an unprecedented breadth of expression.

But this structural design is changing–both legally and technically as corporations have established themselves as virtual gatekeepers of the Net while Congress and parliaments in the pockets of media magnates, have rewritten copyright and patent laws to stifle creativity and progress. In his -The Vision for the Creative Commons: What are We and Where are We Headed? Free Culture contribution to the Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons, a conference on the internet, law and the importance of open content licensing in the digital age, Lessig said that there are two general principles that Creative Commons stands for.

The first is that we want to find a way to lower the cost of the law, not eliminate the law, but lower the costs associated with the law in making creativity possible. Second, we want to enable ‘commonses’ wherever they might help innovation, not in contrast to property, but complementing property, recognising that the complement of commons and property is what makes the greatest creativity possible.

Freedom here is not ‘free’ in the sense of ‘free beer’ but ‘free’ in the sense of ‘freedom’, express freedom associated with content, to encourage the extraordinary range of creativity that could be realised.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:21 AM |