Update to my comments on the Lessig Talk in Melbourne

Hmmm, my post on Lawrence Lessig's appearance in Melbourne has generated some comment action. A couple of quick responses to my commentators.

Darren said that

'I think it was more in the nature of a call to arms rather than a battle plan. The other thing I would say that he only had a limited time to deal with the topic in the Melbourne talk, and so skipped a few things'

I entirely agree. As I noted at length in my post - this talk - and Lessig's approach more generally - has been about using rhetoric aned simple stories to get people interested, excited, and most importantly, acting. This is all the more important given Lessig's two basic prongs in action: (a) law reform (for which he holds out little hope, at least in the US) and (b) voluntary adoption of 'reasonable' rights through the Creative Commons approach. As he has said (and as I noted in my post) - this is a movement, not a reasoned, academic debate.

Darren also said that

'[Lessig's argument about 'talking about movies' and remixing is that] the problem is not copyright law, but the combination of reducing copyright law to being enforced by technology, so that if the content is carried on a digital medium, then it is restricted and unable to be remixed as a digital collage of work'

Again, I think I agree. Digital restrictions make the possibility of collage, and piecing together bits of culture in a new form much more difficult, and potentially impossible. But it is also important to remember that technology is also putting the means of creation, cheaply, in our hands. They are now advertising digital movie cameras, and indeed, some phones already enable the creation of digital clips. We have all the less need to cut and paste from others audio-visual works when we can create our own. Obviously, that is not everything (the examples Lessig used in his talk were extremely funny and REQUIRED remixing of existing material). But it is not the be all and end all. I, too, am very happy to debate this more.

ACS said:

I congratulate the writer of this blog for putting something up that points out the nature of Lessig's arguments.
Although Lessig is a legal professor his works are often more politically biased that based in law.

My response is that I think this is a little unfair. I think Lessig uses much rhetoric, and simple stories, to illustrate one side of a debate. Lessig's arguments are undoubtedly sometimes oversimplified - particularly in a talk - but on the other hand, aren't we often at risk of forgetting that copyright now affects all sorts of people - including people who haven't had to undergo the trial by fire of trying to understand our Copyright Act? Lessig is, I think, considerably less 'politically biased' than many in this debate.

ACS also said:

'Take his argument for peer to peer software that by putting a song on peer to peer there is an increased stimulus for consumers to buy the product - he uses the the band Wilco as an example. The problem is that despite improving the demand for works it doesnt properly address the failure of p2p to recognise the rights of authors under Copyright. Rather it says if a good thing may happen we should not worry if the law is being broken.'

I must defend Lessig here: Lessig is at pains, particularly in his recent writing and his talk in Melbourne, to point out that he thinks we need to be much stronger in condemning piracy. In fact, on Sunday it was only Joichi Ito who made the 'file sharing doesn't damage sales' argument.

ACS also argued that:

'Academic expression without practical grounding should not be used to influence a generation of lawyers into believing that freedom with respect to copyright is the same as freedom of speech.

I think this is a very overstated fear. I have been teaching intellectual property and Internet-related law for 4 years now. I have had many students, and many classes. They are skeptical of arguments at both ends of the extreme. They are not out there thinking file sharing is free speech - in fact, they have consistently impressed me with their ability to see the real issues, and their consciousness of a need for all interests - the creative and the commercial - to be respected.

And finally, Robert Merkel noted that:

'Politics is a dirty business, requiring complex issues to be simplified - for experts in the field, oversimplified - for people to grasp the essential points. Lessig arguably overstretches an analogy, and didn't raise an infinite number of other compelling arguments against the current copyright regime - for instance about how copyright has a particularly Western, early 20th-century model of how creative works come into being. I'm prepared to cut him a little slack.'

As I noted, I think there are things that Lessig does that are valuable. The Creative Commons scheme is one. And we need a full range of views and stories to have this debate. May the debate continue!