Righting copywrongs
Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig has turned the intellectual ownership
debate on its ear
By DAVID AKIN
Globe and Mail Update Monday, Apr. 12, 2004
http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040412.wxlessig12/BNStory/Technology/

While Canada's content creators pored over a controversial Federal Court
of Canada ruling that seemed to set ideas about ownership of intellectual
property on its head, Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law School professor,
author, and influential voice for copyright reform in the United States,
was out proving that free downloads and fewer restrictions can be a
creator's best friend.

On March 31, the Federal Court ruled that sharing digital music files over
the Internet did not infringe on copyright rules. Some filmmakers, TV
broadcasters, authors, software publishers and other content creators
wondered if their work was still copyright-protected under Canadian law.

The ruling sparked a debate on Canada's editorial pages and Internet chat
rooms about the rights of creators to control their work.

Lessig convinced his publisher, Penguin Books, to allow his new book, Free
Culture, to come into the world this spring under a Creative Commons
licence, a relatively new kind of copyright which, among other things,
allows anyone to make and distribute a non-commercial audio performance of
his book without even asking his permission.

And sure enough, days after the book's release, one of his fans put out
the call: Are there any volunteers who would read and record a chapter of
Free Culture and then post an MP3 copy of that recording on their website?

Overnight, the first chapter was read and posted on-line. Within days, the
whole book was there, each chapter read by different volunteers. Lessig
himself said he planned to read a chapter and added to what the community
of his readers had now claimed partly as their own.

"Quite frankly, I hadn't ever expected it," Lessig said in a telephone
interview from his office at Stanford.

Lessig expected some derivatives of the work to appear. In addition to
waiving the non-commercial audio rights, he's let an electronic version of
the book be posted on the Internet where readers can download it for free,
mark it up, annotate it and pass it on – again, so long as its for a
non-commercial purpose and the source is attributed.

The free download is available for a limited time from
http://www.amazon.com, a company that, counter intuitively, would rather
sell you the book than host a free download of it.

"Here's Amazon trying do one thing: sell books. So why are they giving
away a book that they're trying to sell? I think they understand, too,
that this is a good way to get people into buying the book," Lessig said.

At one point late last week, Free Culture held the 36th position on
Amazon.com's rank of best-selling books. That 36th position would not have
reflected any free copies of the electronic version that had been
downloaded.

Other sites where Free Culture book can be downloaded are at
http://www.free-culture.org and http://www.lessig.org.

Lessig helped create and establish the Creative Commons license because he
believes U.S. copyright law is too restrictive and that the ability to
riff off of or modify creative works is crucial for the intellectual
health of any society.

Free Culture's subtitle is How Big Media Uses Technology and The Law to
Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. Big media in this case stands in
for everything from the Walt Disney Co., and its legal pursuit of anyone
who would use Mickey Mouse without its authorization to the world's record
companies who are trying to sue on-line file-sharers.

By distributing Free Culture under a Creative Commons licence, Lessig
would be leading by example.

"There was a certain moment there where I required the strength of my
convictions," Lessig said. He could have made more money, for example, by
selling the audio rights and waiting for some mellifluous-toned actor to
read his work.

He can still do that – he has reserved the rights to any commercial audio
performance of his work – but he's thrilled that the amateurs have jumped
in first.

"The more I think about it the more I think it's exactly right the way
it's happened. It builds a community around the work. People read the
work.

"People can get access to the work more easily and that's all to the
benefit of spreading ideas and selling more books," Lessig said.

That first call for volunteers to create an audio version of Lessig's book
was made by the Rev. A.K.M. Adam, a theologian at the Seabury-Western
Theological Seminary in Evanston, Ill.

Adam is better known to his friends and correspondents as Akma, the
operator of the website http://www.disseminary.org, and one of the
Internet's most influential and popular philosophers and bloggers.

"The book itself is an expression of faith in the commons as the premise
for shared cultural activity in the sphere of publication and
communication, the exchange of ideas," Akma said in a telephone interview.

"So when Lessig offered the book for download as his sign of commitment to
that premise, it was exciting to see his readers respond by this gesture,
which makes the book that much more available and indicates their
commitment and participation in the production of the book," he said.

The experiment has also been a matter of faith for Lessig's publisher,
Penguin Books (USA) Inc. of New York.

"This is a risk for us and it's a risk for Larry," said Scott Moyers,
senior editor at Penguin and the editor on Lessig's last two books.

But Moyers said it seemed to be a risk worth taking. First, Lessig's books
(Free Culture is his third) make money and, at the very least, there would
be assured sales of the book to university students. Both of Lessig's
prior works had become required reading for some post-secondary courses
here and in the U.S.

"He's a very strong seller. He's a guy any publisher is very happy to have
on their list," Moyers said. But more important was the idea that Lessig
would be doing precisely what his book was prescribing. "I would love to
do this again because that would mean that this has been a success,"
Moyers said.

The experiment also underlines that, just as the success of the film
version of The Lord of the Rings can turn the book the film is based on
into a bestseller again, derivatives or copies of some kinds of content
can drive an audience back to the source, in this case, the printed bound
object that is the book.

"This is one of the counter-intuitive lessons that the U.S. needs
desperately to learn from a legal institutional point-of-view and that
capitalist business enterprises need to learn for their own advancement
and that is that freely available works on-line are not antithetical to
highly produced, packaged, refined versions of the work through
conventional venues," Akma said.

"This is a development, a mutation in the market that an alert
entrepreneur can work to his or her advantage."

[David Akin is a CTV correspondent and contributing writer to The Globe
and Mail]