Professor Lessig will be a guest on NPR on Friday, 02/06/09 at 1 pm. He will be discussing his recent article in the Wall Street Journal and his views on the present state of copyright law. The local NPR station where he will be a guest is KUOW 94.9 FM
On today’s NPR show (thanks for the head’s up!), Lessig said that trying to prosecute violations of music sharing amounted to a “failed war of prohibition” and suggested that “we achieve the objectives of copyright law without turning out a generation of felons.” Yes, good point. A similar, alternative-to-copyright angle was echoed by our guest speaker as she spoke about going around copyright law (lobbying, talking with competitors and interested parties, to negotiate around and before a lawsuit). Basically, act preventatively. This makes sense, and in many ways, is the goal of law in the first place—give people guidelines so that they will follow them, adjudicate as a last resort. So, in thinking about all of this, Lessig preempts my thought process and says “copyright is prospective, not retrospective.” I can’t but answer in my head: “technically.”
ReplyDeleteSometimes, it doesn’t seem that way. If Wayne Gretsky’s motto is to “go where the puck is going, not where it’s been,” is copyright law doing a good enough job advancing innovation, or rather, is it becoming more a legal nuisance to get around? I realize there’s an inevitable tension between law as a guideline and law as an obstacle, but in the digital world, it seems to me that copyright isn’t keep the balance very well and increasingly demands that innovation work, somehow, despite the law (rather than because of it).
-Lauren Sancken