Free books for you
Lately, I've been wondering what philosophical difference divides a good-old library, where one can go to enjoy free books, from downloading music off P2Ps. Why is it that the book industry doesn't rise up to complain about all those people stealing the intellectual property of authors like the thousands of recording artists and lawyers who swear they'll go broke if we don't pay $16.99 for yet another version of Alanis Morissette's "Jagged Little Pill." (I admit to not doing too much digging beyond Wikipedia into the history of libraries, but that entry leads me to believe the library boat had already sailed by the time book publishers came along.) It's safe to say that I generally tend to err toward the side of free use for all.
It is with this mentality that I approached Lessig's "The Future of Ideas," and I'd intended to write a little rant on its applications in regard to musical file sharing, essentially claiming, for perhaps the 5,000th time since I first encountered Napster that night in my freshman year dorm room, that music should be free, or at least freer than it is.
Ahh, but then I went home last week to visit my cats and my family. My mom works in a photo lab in one of those big box stores, and constantly regales me with stories about the completely random enforcement of copyright rules in her store. Big box store has a corporate-wide policy that each photo lab tends to enforce on its own, though my mom has done a bit of research and generally concluded that the laws on which big box store claims to be basing its policy don't exist. Basically, if you go into big box store to have your photos developed (or to have copies made of other photos) and they look "too good," the store employees are empowered to deny you your photos on the basis that you've probably stolen them from a professional and don't have permission to be making copies of them. This makes sense if you're trying to make copies of a professional portrait or something, but too often my mom's co-workers have randomly (and trust me, it is completely random) denied newlyweds access to the only copies of their wedding pictures because they looked "too good," even though the groom's second cousin took them with a disposable Kodak. (My mom, for the record, eventually helped get the photos back into the couple's hands.)
Through her protests of the big box policy, my mom's shared with me strange tidbits of American copyright law, much in the fashion of Lawrence Lessig.
Both examples, though, can apply to a simple statement Lessig makes: "Sometimes, a society gets stuck." We're stuck right now as we try to figure out what's fair to music-lovers and artists alike, just as my mom's big box employers are stuck because they tried to make a blanket policy that can easily be understood by big box employees and the lowest common denominator among their shoppers.
It is with this mentality that I approached Lessig's "The Future of Ideas," and I'd intended to write a little rant on its applications in regard to musical file sharing, essentially claiming, for perhaps the 5,000th time since I first encountered Napster that night in my freshman year dorm room, that music should be free, or at least freer than it is.
Ahh, but then I went home last week to visit my cats and my family. My mom works in a photo lab in one of those big box stores, and constantly regales me with stories about the completely random enforcement of copyright rules in her store. Big box store has a corporate-wide policy that each photo lab tends to enforce on its own, though my mom has done a bit of research and generally concluded that the laws on which big box store claims to be basing its policy don't exist. Basically, if you go into big box store to have your photos developed (or to have copies made of other photos) and they look "too good," the store employees are empowered to deny you your photos on the basis that you've probably stolen them from a professional and don't have permission to be making copies of them. This makes sense if you're trying to make copies of a professional portrait or something, but too often my mom's co-workers have randomly (and trust me, it is completely random) denied newlyweds access to the only copies of their wedding pictures because they looked "too good," even though the groom's second cousin took them with a disposable Kodak. (My mom, for the record, eventually helped get the photos back into the couple's hands.)
Through her protests of the big box policy, my mom's shared with me strange tidbits of American copyright law, much in the fashion of Lawrence Lessig.
Both examples, though, can apply to a simple statement Lessig makes: "Sometimes, a society gets stuck." We're stuck right now as we try to figure out what's fair to music-lovers and artists alike, just as my mom's big box employers are stuck because they tried to make a blanket policy that can easily be understood by big box employees and the lowest common denominator among their shoppers.
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