Class Three: Intellectual Property

Review B-Roll Footage from Last Time: Common Shooting Errors

Back to As We May Think

The Impact of the Market (to which we will also return later)

"The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also be able to consult it, and this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled at by a few.

Compression is important, however, when it comes to costs. The material for the microfilm Britannica would cost a nickel, and it could be mailed anywhere for a cent. What would it cost to print a million copies? To print a sheet of newspaper, in a large edition, costs a small fraction of a cent. The entire material of the Britannica in reduced microfilm form would go on a sheet eight and one-half by eleven inches. Once it is available, with the photographic reproduction methods of the future, duplicates in large quantities could probably be turned out for a cent apiece beyond the cost of materials." (40)

"With machines for advanced analysis no such situation existed; for there was and is no extensive market; the users of advanced methods of manipulating data are a very small part of the population." (41)

Note that the memex contents are "purchased"

Is this an innocent example?

"The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him." (45-46)

Yet he also imagines file sharing

"And his trails do not fade. Several years later, his talk with a friend turns to the queer ways in which a people resist innovations, even of vital interest. He has an example, in the fact that the outraged Europeans still failed to adopt the Turkish bow. In fact he has a trail on it. A touch brings up the code book. Tapping a few keys projects the head of the trail. A lever runs through it at will, stopping at interesting items, going off on side excursions. It is an interesting trail, pertinent to the discussion. So he sets a reproducer in action, photographs the whole trail out, and passes it to his friend for insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into the more general trail."(46)

Bush is interested in community memory and neurological applications (47)

"Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race."

"We know that when the eye sees, all the consequent information is transmitted to the brain by means of electrical vibrations in the channel of the optic nerve. This is an exact analogy with the electrical vibrations which occur in the cable of a television set: they convey the picture from the photocells which see it to the radio transmitter from which it is broadcast." (47)

Lawrence Lessig

The "Introduction" in Free Culture

As the Internet has been integrated into ordinary life, it has
changed things. Some of these changes are technical—the Internet has
made communication faster, it has lowered the cost of gathering data,
and so on. These technical changes are not the focus of this book.They
are important. They are not well understood. But they are the sort of
thing that would simply go away if we all just switched the Internet off.
They don’t affect people who don’t use the Internet, or at least they
don’t affect them directly. They are the proper subject of a book about
the Internet. But this is not a book about the Internet.
Instead, this book is about an effect of the Internet beyond the Internet
itself: an effect upon how culture is made. My claim is that the
Internet has induced an important and unrecognized change in that
process. That change will radically transform a tradition that is as old as
the Republic itself. Most, if they recognized this change, would reject
it. Yet most don’t even see the change that the Internet has introduced. (7)

At the beginning of our history, and for just about the whole of our
tradition, noncommercial culture was essentially unregulated. Of
course, if your stories were lewd, or if your song disturbed the peace,
then the law might intervene. But the law was never directly concerned
with the creation or spread of this form of culture, and it left this culture
“free.” The ordinary ways in which ordinary individuals shared and
transformed their culture—telling stories, reenacting scenes from plays
or TV, participating in fan clubs, sharing music, making tapes—were
left alone by the law. (8)

The focus of the law was on commercial creativity. At first slightly,
then quite extensively, the law protected the incentives of creators by
granting them exclusive rights to their creative work, so that they could
sell those exclusive rights in a commercial marketplace.8 This is also, of
course, an important part of creativity and culture, and it has become
an increasingly important part in America. But in no sense was it dominant
within our tradition. It was instead just one part, a controlled
part, balanced with the free. (8)

This rough divide between the free and the controlled has now
been erased.9 The Internet has set the stage for this erasure and,
pushed by big media, the law has now affected it. For the first time in
our tradition, the ordinary ways in which individuals create and share
culture fall within the reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded
to draw within its control a vast amount of culture and creativity
that it never reached before. The technology that preserved the
balance of our history—between uses of our culture that were free and
uses of our culture that were only upon permission—has been undone.
The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and
more a permission culture. (8)

The idea of "cyberspaces" in Code 2.0

I’ve said we can distinguish the Internet from cyberspace. To make the distinctive form of regulation that is the subject of this part salient, we need to say a bit more about this distinction. The Internet is a medium of communication. People do things “on” the Internet. Most of those things are trivial, even if important. People pay bills on the Internet, they make reservations at restaurants. They get their news from the Internet. They send news to family members using e-mail or IM chat. These uses are important in the sense that they affect the economy and make life easier and harder for those using the Internet. But they ’re not important in the sense that they change how people live. It’s very cool that you can buy books with one click at Amazon. I buy tons (maybe literally) of books I wouldn ’t otherwise have bought. But my life has not been changed by one-click (even if my bank account has). It ’s been made easier and more literate, but not anything fundamentally different.

Cyberspace, by contrast, is not just about making life easier. It is about making life different, or perhaps better. It is about making a different (or second) life. It evokes, or calls to life, ways of interacting that were not possible before. I don ’t mean that the interaction is new—we’ve always had communities; these communities have always produced something close to what I will describe cyberspace to have produced. But these cyberspace communities create a difference in degree that has matured into a difference in kind. There is something unique about the interactions in these spaces, and something especially unique about how they are regulated.

Life in cyberspace is regulated primarily through the code of cyberspace. Not regulated in the sense of Part I —my point is not that the code makes it easy to know who did what so that penalties can be visited upon those who behaved badly. Regulated in the sense that bars on a prison regulate the movement of a prisoner, or regulated in the sense that stairs regulate the access of the disabled. Code is a regulator in cyberspace because it defines the terms upon which cyberspace is offered. And those who set those terms increasingly recognize the code as a means to achieving the behaviors that benefit them best.

And so too with the Internet. Code on the Internet is also a regulator, and people live life on the Internet subject to that regulation. But my strategy in this chapter is to begin with the more obscure as a way to build recognition about the familiar. Once you see the technique applied to worlds you are unlikely to inhabit, you will recognize the technique applied to the world you inhabit all the time.

Lessig on "What Things Regulate?"