Free Culture | Lawrence Lessig | Talks at Google

Thanks. And just to be clear, I'm Lawrence Lessig. So Basic Books wanted me to come here in this author series because they want to sell books related to code V2. And code V2 is a continuation of the first Code. It's an attempt to explain the way technology and policy interact. And that's an extraordinarily important interaction for you guys. I know you think about that all the time. In fact, the lawyers who I train for a living who come to work for Google, which is just about all the lawyers I train for a living you hire, everybody think constantly about this question of how to architect policies that respect or make sense of insane legal doctrine. That's not what I want to talk about. I hope you're okay with that, Basic Books. I want to talk about the interaction between culture and policy because that's another way in which the Heisenberg principle really functions here, especially companies like Google, as they interact with culture, change it. And there's an important lesson that I don't think companies have yet recognized about how they're going to best affect the culture around them, at least best from the perspective of their own stockholders, which I guess all of you guys are now, right? So that's the frame and here's the story. There's this buzz, especially since I work at also work at Wired. This is the orthodoxy. There's this orthodoxy that says the Internet is basically long tail. That's what it's about, right? So long tail, you all know, which is the difference between the market supported in the physical world, that's the head, and the market that's enabled in the digital world, that's the tail. And the tail is of course, what makes companies like these interesting. And it's of course, what made companies like this extraordinarily profitable. Because recognizing the value in the tail was a way of producing new value in the economy. But don't tell Chris. I think there's something fundamentally missing in the story of the long tail, or at least in its understanding of what's important about the Internet. And it's of course not to say that what's missing is to say that long tail is not everything. And in fact, what it's missing is maybe the most important thing about the Internet. And so that's what I want to talk about today. So people talk about the culture of the Internet. I think we need to recognize that there are in fact two different cultures that are functioning in the context of the Internet. I want to talk about the read only and read write culture. So the Read only Culture is this massively efficient technology for enabling people anytime and anywhere to buy and consume culture. And that's culture that's been created elsewhere. This is the poster child for that image of culture. Apple itunes music store enabling you for 99 cents to buy whatever song you want now videos at $1.99. And it's not just Apple, others too. The these companies too engaging in this practice of increasingly perfecting the capacity or market for the buying of culture. That's what the Long Tail's best about. Long Tail's talking about how this network enables this new market for buying culture. And of course what's interesting is the size of the tail. So Netflix estimates 21% of their market is in the long tail. Amazon 25% Rhapsody 40%. And that's of course producing importantly more diversity in culture, more niches in culture, a better market, a more efficient market. And that's the great value of the Long tail. But in addition to this more efficient market. But wait, there's more here. It's not just the capacity to make more available that's important. It's also that these more markets involve more control over how people use culture. So the Apple iTunes Music for 99 cents enables you to buy whatever song you want and download it to your ipod, but only to your ipod. Well, you guys can do anything you want. But most people but only to your ipod. And you're guaranteed in this culture, if you do that, you're cool, right? That's the compensation for this. And it's not just Apple embedding control into the culture. They sell others too. Amazon experimenting with pay per page ways of selling books. Ebook companies from the beginning experimenting with pay per read ways of selling books. So that technology tells you what freedom you have with respect to this culture. Increasingly perfecting markets but also increasingly perfecting the control copyright owners have over the culture you consume. Control over how people use and consume culture. That's the read only Internet. Radically different read write Internet. So that's the Internet enabled by these types of companies. Companies that of course interested in you consuming culture, but also really interested in you creating and sharing that creativity. So I don't have to show you guys here these kinds of examples, but they're still fun. So I'm going to show them to you anyway. For example, how many people have heard of AMVs? Cool. I can actually teach some Google technologists something about the world. So here it is. AMVs are anime music videos. You all know what anime are these Japanese cartoons, right? Well, AMVs are kids who take anime and re edit them, setting them to a music track. So I'm going to show you some quick clips of examples. All of the art here is found. It's just the editing that's new. But you got. Where he's more familiar. Sa. These are creators. You could say they're recreators. Literally tens of thousands of kids spread across the network in these communities of non commercial re creativity. Remix is what they do, right? And it's not just AMVs using technology to remix. You all know this example of the Beatles White Album which was taken by Jay Z to make the Black Album or inspired to make the Black Album. But then DJ Danger Mouse took the White Album and Black Album together and synthesized the tracks to produce something literally gray, right? Or in the context of one's ordinary life. In 2004, this film incarnation made its debut at Cannes. Set by the BBC to wow Cannes. This is a film made for $218. The kid took video it shot through his whole life and using an imac given to him by a friend, he remixed it of quality to wow Cannes and win the 2004 Los Angeles International Film Festival. Or in the ordinary space of culture. This is a fantastic group of kids. I think they're here in New York actually. So you can figure the rest. Okay then. And then maybe most important, in the context of politics, let me give you three quick examples.

Do you ever get the feeling you are living in a virtual reality dream world fabricated to enslave your mind?

Arrive all war edition of American Juniors.

But there is another sound.

The sound of goodwill. Sorry, man. There I'm far away in a remote place and we get these. These things. Or this one's a little simpler to make.

So to answer your question, I just know how this world works. I see on the TV screens how hard it is. We're making progress. It is hard work. You know, it's hard work. It's hard work. For really good people working hard, they can do the hard work. That's what distinguishes us from the enemy. And it's hard work.

It is necessary work.

And that's essential. But again, I want to tell the American people it's hard work. It is hard work.

It's hard work.

There's no doubt in my mind that's necessary work. I understand how hard it is. That's my job.

No doubt it's tough.

It's hard work, which I would really want to do, but I hope I never have to. Making progress there. I reject this notion.

It's Ludicrous.

It is hard work. It's hard work. That's the plan for victory, and that is the best way. What I said was it's hard work and made that very clear.

And this is my favorite. There's only. They tell me how to care. Okay, the final example, this is a little bit touchy to some people. I don't get it. But, you know, this is a little sensitive. And so just chill because the underlying message here is, Jesus does survive, so don't worry. But then I spent so many nights thinking how you been wrong, that was wrong.

And I learned how to get along with.

But there's a sequel, so don't worry. He does survive. It's okay. So this is digital creativity. This is the read write culture that digital technologies are building. So this is important not because the techniques here are something new. Of course, since the beginning of film or television, people have been able to engage in exactly these techniques to remix sound and culture to produce something entertaining. But what's important here is that these tools have been democratized, right? Anybody with a $1,500 computer can take sounds and images from the culture around us, mix them together in a way that says something differently, more powerfully. Think about the Bush Blair clip, right? The extraordinary brilliance of that mixture of images and sound by Lionel Ritchie, a Republican, right? All of it wrapped together says something more powerfully than any op ed in the New York Times ever could, right? So this is extraordinarily important. New ways of speaking, taking tools of creativity and making them tools of speech. It's a new potential to speak, a new potential to learn. It is what literacy is in this century. That's the read write culture. Now also here there's a long tail story. So Chris obsesses forever about Wikipedia and the amazing long tail like characteristics of Wikipedia. He talks about the remixers or mashup artists, talks about amateur astronomers who have radically changed what astronomy is. He categorizes them as a pro am generation. Right? But the important point here is that the way these communities function is different from the way commercial communities function. And Anderson misses this important difference. We need to see something about what he misses. And that's the objective of what I want to tell you today. I want to introduce one more distinction to help you to see what the long tail misses, and I think see something about what the Internet needs to teach all of us. Ok? So I said there's two cultures, read only, read write culture. There are also at least two kinds of economies. Say there's a read Only and a read write economy. So each of these economies has its own logic, but these logics are different. So read only economy is primarily this kind of commercial marketplace, right? The quid pro quo. You do this for that. If you have something free in this economy, it's just a technique. It's a way to buy you into a certain kind of product, right? Volunteers in this economy don't exist, right? You imagine a campaign to get people to volunteer for Walmart. It'd be a little bit weird, right? The idea that you'd go out and dedicate your time to helping Walmart. And indeed, it's not just strange, you'd feel like a chump if you spent your time helping Walmart, because Walmart exists in the commercial economy. In that economy, the logic is you do stuff for money. It has a logic. That's the logic of the market. It's important and valuable. I don't mean to diss it, it is critical, but it's one distinct logic. The read write economy has a different economy. That economy is not the commercial economy. So think about Wikipedia. There are thousands of volunteers in Wikipedia. They do insanely tedious work. They do this insanely tedious work for free. Now, why did they do this? I don't think anybody really knows. Totally unclear why they're doing this. But what is clear is that if you introduced the norms of the market into this place, like you said, we're going to offer to pay people to edit our Wikipedia site, you'd get less, not more work out of Wikipedia volunteers. They do it in part because the logic of the space is not a logic of the market, it's a logic of a community. These are amateurs, meaning people who do it for the love of what they do and not for the money. That's what amateur originally meant. So many people have different ways of describing this amateur production, peer production, social production. The point is, however you describe it, it's a different kind of production. It's a different economy, a sharing economy. Now, we don't yet understand exactly how that economy functions or why it functions. What do you do to call it into being? You don't just open up a blog or a wiki and say, bingo, I've got Wikipedia right. You've got to have ways to build this community. People are beginning to study it very seriously and powerfully. This is my favorite book about it, Yochai Benkler's the Wealth of Networks. Eric Von Hippel also has a fantastic account about how these communities exist and how companies interact with them. But of course, the founding such sharing economy was the community that built free software, the GNU Linux operating system, open source software. That's what Steven Weber writes about in this book. The point is we need to understand this economy because it has a huge potential for social and economic wealth. And that wealth complements. It doesn't. It's not inconsistent with, but it complements this commercial economy. Okay, So I say there's two cultures, two economies. Now I just want to make one more adjustment before I make this argument. There's actually maybe three economies. So I want to think about the read only and read write economy meshed together. Because if you think about the commerce and the sharing economy, sometimes these economies like to interact. And when they want to interact, we should think about that interaction as a kind of hybrid economy. So here, the famous hybrid economist Mozilla. Think about what Mozilla does. Tries to make money, but it needs to make money in a way that does not stop people from voluntarily giving their time to make Mozilla a better platform or Red Hat. They want to make money off of the GNU Linux operating system, but they need to do it in a way that doesn't stop people from contributing to the GNU Linux operating system. Second Life is trying to build extraordinary value in their virtual world. But all of the value comes from the volunteer effort of people building stuff inside that world. YouTube and Google Video. These are hybrid economies where you have obviously an intent, I hope someday to make lots of money off of what you're building in this space. But you're building it. You're building that money out of the volunteer community product that people produce as they put into this Google Video space. So the hybrid economy has one part commerce and the other part sharing. And the challenge is that the commercial activity not poison the sharing activity. So there's real potential here. Again, think about the potential that Red Hat has made real. And that potential comes from finding this way to facilitate a hybrid economy. So it's not everything that the Internet is, no doubt, but I think it's increasingly the most important thing because this has the most important potential for growth in the network environment. And so we got to think about the challenges that limit this potential growth. Okay, so I want to identify two such challenges in the context of this hybrid economy. One challenge is presented by legal policy and the other is a challenge presented by corporate culture. Okay, so think about the policy one first, probably more familiar to all of you. And this is a challenge presented by this tiny little kid in a circle, copyright law. And the copyright law's relation to these two different economies. So think about copyright law's relation to the read only culture. Copyright law supports the read only culture. Copyright law supports it in the sense that it supports the legal claims of the read only culture to exercise perfect control over how people consume culture. Perfect control in the sense that it gives the copyright owner the right to say, here's how you use our culture. Now, importantly, copyright law hasn't always given copyright owners this kind of control. In the old world or the analog world, copyright law's regulation is actually quite limited and incomplete. If you think about the uses of culture in the old world, these uses were technically out of the reach of the regulation of copyright law. So think about a book in physical space. If you think about all the uses of a book in physical space, an important set of these uses are technically unregulated by the law. So to read a book is not a fair use of the book, It's a free use of the book. Because to read a book in the real world doesn't produce a copy. To give someone a book is not a fair use, it's a free use. Because to give someone a book is not to produce a copy. To sell a book is explicitly exempted from the control of copyright law. Selling a book doesn't produce a copy. To sleep on a book is an unregulated use of the book in physical space. Sleeping on a book doesn't produce. But then at the core of these unregulated uses are a set of importantly regulated uses, regulated to create the incentives authors need to produce great new work. So you want to publish the book, need permission from the copyright owner, because that monopoly is necessary to give at least some authors the incentives they need to create. Then in the American tradition, there's a thin sliver of exceptions. You guys are building your whole business on this idea. But it's a thin sliver of exceptions called fair uses, uses which otherwise would have been regulated by the law, but which the law says ought to remain free because it's important for free culture that it remains free. So you can take my most well, book before this book, Free culture, you can write a review of that book. You can write a totally idiotic review of that book. And I guarantee that's possible. I've seen many of those reviews. In that review, you can copy my words, right? Copy my words. And there's nothing I can do about it. Because though it's copying, so it triggers copyright law, the law says that copying ought to be outside of the control of the copyright Owner, because otherwise you wouldn't get criticism and the growth of culture. So the point is, in the old world, most uses of culture by ordinary people are unregulated, free. And the target of the regulation of copyright law is commercial uses of culture. So in that old world, you couldn't legally exercise perfect control over how people use culture, because the law just didn't extend that far. The digital world is radically different. This is a difference produced in part by the difference between analog and digital culture. Because if copyright law regulates something called copies, the one thing we know about digital world is that every single use is a copy. There's no way to read a book on the Internet without producing a copy somewhere in a cache or at least in ram, right? So in the digital world, every single use of culture produces a copy. Lawyers look at that and they oh, bingo. Every single use requires permission now, because every use has triggered copyright law. So we go from this world of balance between regulation and unregulation to a world where presumptively everything is regulated merely because the platform through which we get access to our culture has changed. And then this law of regulation is supplemented with technology, digital rights management technology, which together increasingly perfect the capacity the copyright owner to control how people use culture. That's the read only Internet and its relationship to copyright. It loves copyright. Well, think now about the read write Internet's relationship to copyright. This relationship is different. Copyright law presumptively conflicts with the read write Internet. It conflicts because in a world where every single use is a copy, copyright law regulating every use, permission is required for all of these uses and permission is simply not coming. So AMVs are increasingly getting notice and takedowns for their work. DJ Danger Mouse knew the Beatles never give permission to remix their work. This kid, when he found he could wow Khan for $218, then found it would cost $400,000 to clear the rights to the music in the background of the video he had shot. This is my favorite example. See just how weird we lawyers can be? I don't care what you think about Tony Blair. I don't care what you think about George Bush. I don't care what you think about the war. One thing you can't think about that video is what the lawyers said when they were asked for permission to synchronize that music with those images. Lawyers said, no, you can't have permission because, quote, it's not funny, end quote. So the point is, we build this regulation that requires the system of permission. And so, as currently architected, the regulation Smothers the capacity for this read write culture to take off. It rejects it. Now, the energy with which it rejects it is a function of a separate influence happening in our culture, an influence related to war. We have many wars in our culture, of course, but I'm talking about the copyright wars war, which my friend Jack Valenti, former president of the Motion Picture association of America, refers to as his own, quote, terrorist war, where apparently it's our children who are the terrorists in this war. And so this rhetoric of war then leads to the talk about how we're going to develop new weapons, weapons of law and technology, all designed to eliminate something called piracy. All the while oblivious to the fact that the very same tools designed to stop, quote, piracy will also kill potential for this read write Internet. The locks designed to protect the read only Internet DRM and their collected technologies will lock out much of the potential of the read write Internet. And so the law effectively chooses between these two cultures a read only culture which it supports, and a read write culture which it opposes. So that's the first block to the development of this hybrid culture. Because of the extraordinary uncertainty that exists out there around the capacity for user generated content to actually be used to build a business, it's still much clear how businesses can build using the user generated content that's out there. And that will not be clear until the law enters the 21st century, which will happen about 2206, I think. But now I want to talk about the culture, which is much more important because that's actually something people can do something about in the short term. And this is the cultural effect of the corporate or commercial economy on the hybrid economy. So focusing on how this economy functions, this is recognizing a certain ethic that makes the hybrid economy function best. And it's an ethic which is extremely hard to teach those who live exclusively in the commercial economy. Now, I could talk about this in the context of your company, but it's easier to talk about someone else. So I want to talk about it in the context of YouTube. So YouTube gets born as an expression of the sharing economy. People are just sharing lawyers who tell you pirating all sorts of content all over the web, including content which is not technically the same kind of piracy. They're not just taking a movie down and then putting it on YouTube. They're also producing their own content and making their own remixes available on the Internet. So that's how it gets born. And very quickly it races out to try to figure out how it's going to have a business model around this new sharing economy. And so it invites a whole bunch of commerce people into the room and says, well, what are we going to do? How are we going to make this work? And the problem is, as I want to emphasize this problem of the hybrid economy, because what YouTube has got to do is to build a commercial business that doesn't simultaneously poison the sharing economy. Well, are they going to succeed in that? I know what you hope, but I want to know whether they're going to succeed. Very important clue just happened about a week and a half ago with the announcement of this deal that they had struck with these guys. So Warner, this is not actually Warner's logo, but it's the fun one I could find on Google images. Warner and YouTube have signed a deal and the deal will make it so that people making videos in YouTube can use Warner music if they pay a certain amount and if they embed a certain kind of DRM that gives Warner the capacity to control how this content spreads on the net and gives Warner the capacity to pull out music if it turns out their artists don't like it. So it's the right to use, not free, either in free speech or free beer sense and locked up with technology to actually control whether the use will be permitted. Now, the problem here is that that has a great potential to change the character of this business. Because if you add that deal with a whole bunch of other things that are going on in YouTube, where YouTube's increasingly facilitating people on the outside controlling the content that's on their pages, it creates the risk for them that they will increasingly be seen not as this hybrid, but as a tool of the media companies who are essentially controlling access to the content. So the ethic of the web, my claim is, is allergic to this kind of control. And that allergy against this obsessive control by the content owners will tilt the attractiveness of this platform away from an increasing range of people who produce culture. Now, what are they supposed to do? What's the alternative? Well, I think the alternative for the hybrid company is to maintain an important kind of neutrality here. It's not to embrace the idea that people ought to be allowed to do whatever they want with content, rejecting copyright. That business model was tried, that was Napster, and then it failed when the law came in and just shut it down. So you can't be against copyright, but you at least have to maintain a neutrality here. So the neutrality says that while you are respecting commerce, you're also respecting or encouraging the sharing economy. So how could they do this well, if they're going to be striking a deal with Warner to enable Warner to provide proprietary content locked up in a way that people can only use it if they pay and attach DRM and perpetual right to pull it out of their content. At the same time, they ought to be encouraging a sharing economy of culture that people can build into their content without worrying about the ping or the drm, not even allowed to put the DRM and the content, and never with the capacity for the artist to pull out. Well, what is that sharing economy? That's the economy that I work for in the other half of my life, where I run this nonprofit Creative Commons that you guys have been big supporters of. There's a Creative Commons filter built into your advanced search page. So it's something that you know about. But what Creative Commons is doing is enabling people to signal the freedoms they want to run with their content. It's a badge that says, I want to be in the sharing economy. I want my stuff to be in the sharing economy. And here's how I want it to be in the sharing economy. So mark your content with the freedoms. And those freedoms are then a license that runs with the content. And that license makes it simple for people to know what they can do with the content and how they can use it in the sharing economy. So the point is, this too is a resource of content. According to the latest linkback count, we launched in December 2002 when one of your lawyers, Glenn Brown, who used to work for me until you saw, stole him without any regard for its effect on the future of freedom in the world. Glen Brown launched in 2002. In December, within a year, there were a million link backs to our licenses. Within two years, the number was at about 12 million. At three years, the number was 45 million. That's last December. Between December and June, the number, at least according to you guys, went from about 45 million to 137 million link backs to our licenses. So as the licenses spread, an incredible range of content is marked with this freedom to say I qualify for the sharing economy. And so the point is, a company like YouTube needs to be facilitating both at the same time, needs to be facilitating the freedom to create distinct from the kind of sharecropping freedom that is the ethic of the Warner Brothers or the Warner ethic of licensing their content. That's what the hybrid economy needs. And my point, and I want to open it up to questions now, is that increasingly the most valuable companies on the net will be those that learn how to Encourage this hybrid economy because those that kill it will be out competed by those who figure out how to turn it into the value which makes their company the most valuable company on the net. So thanks very much. So we have about 20 minutes for questions.

You can hear come up to one of the two mics or I will. If you want to raise your hand, I can also bring this mic over to you.

Thank you very much. Your conclusion, the last couple sentences you just gave us is very provocative.

Can you justify it?

Justify. So the part of the conclusion I should justify is the part that says that this will be the most valuable economy or that. Yeah, yeah, because. So there's one set of slides that I didn't include here which might be necessary, necessary to make this point clear. And those are slides that try to demonstrate that the value or size of the read write Internet is radically bigger than the value or size of the read only Internet. Right. If all we had is an Internet that served companies like Apple itunes, it would be a relatively small, efficient network we could build so people would channel and get whatever content they want. But when you begin to build an Internet that's enabling things like Google Video or enabling people to share all sorts of content and remix their content, encouraging that that's a much more valuable Internet. And the value is not just in the infrastructure and software that supports it. The value is in the labor devoted by people to supporting that Internet. And that labor comes from people spending their time building value voluntarily. So I wrote a review of Von Hippel's book and Weber's book published in the London Review of Books, where I began it by talking about the trick that Microsoft has succeeded in doing of developing communities in Usenet newsgroups of people who volunteer to spend, you know, tons of hours helping other people. Excuse me, helping other people use Microsoft products. Now you think this is like volunteering for Walmart, Right? Why would you do something like this? But what they've done is very carefully engineer the community. So there's none of the typical things that would poison that kind of community. So they don't pay people, but they give them credits. Right. So you can become a most valued contributor in this kind of context. So Microsoft is getting customer support freely given to it by thousands of people who are really extremely good, actually better than what you could hire if you were hiring customer support people, because it's figured out how to engineer this hybrid in that context. So I think a company like Microsoft, at least with respect to customer supporter, out competes somebody who just hires customer support people. And pays them $5 an hour, whatever you pay. Customer support. People who therefore don't know half as much and aren't half as good as what they're doing. And I think that's an example. Maybe I should write a whole book. Maybe I will. Maybe I'll write a whole book about this to sort of patch together a bunch of these examples. But I think you begin to think about the logic of how that works. Realize that when you've got a company, at least plausibly in the hybrid space, then the dimension of competition is whether you're successful in exploiting. Exploiting in a good sense, not in that negative way exploiting makes it sound. But exploiting the sharing economy and those that do it well will produce more value around their product.

So I was a little concerned about the movement of content from this read. Write Sharing Economy into the commercial economy. Typically, people are very generous if they think the content is going into the shared economy and expect enumeration when it goes up. There's a recent article in the New York Times about Chorus Line. The original dancers were given a dollar for their life story in the first version. They receive loyalties out of the generosity, the revival. They get nothing.

Yeah, I think that's a mistake. A lot of these mistakes you can just get away with. And in the context of productions like that, they just get away with it. But in the long term, where there's a repeat play, if that's the way you treat the sharing economy, the sharing economy will leave you. So I think there is a real problem when stuff moves into the commercial economy. And what you need to do is to figure out how to negotiate that movement so you don't make the sharing economy frustrated with you. Now, quite frankly, that's, I think, the most important problem this company has. I think this. Well, Creative Commons does provide a way to do that because we're just deploying and we'll probably be announcing in the beginning of November technology to make it. So you can say, here's my content. Well, here's a company that's doing it. I'll give you a particular example. There's a company called scoopt. C o o P T S C O O P T. Scoopt is in the business of taking, you know, non commercial blogs, for example, or pictures in Flickr. And if you get a scooped account, what that says is you license your content under Creative Commons for non commercial purposes. But if somebody wants to pick it up for commercial purposes, we'll be your agent. So that's a way to facilitate the negotiation between these two economies. Now that's a way, I think that sort of says there's a line and you shouldn't be taking my pictures and publishing them commercially without clearing permissions first. So Adam Curry had a whole bunch of pictures up in Flickr under a Creative Commons license. A Dutch newspaper published them. He sued, he put the license in as first exhibit. Court looked at the license and said, this says you can only use it for commercial purposes. You get permission, you didn't get permission, therefore you violated license, you're guilty of copyright infringement. So that's a way of respecting these two communities and drawing a clear line between them. But in general, the point, this is the one I was trying to emphasize about Google. Like every great company, you guys are born thinking you're the heroes of the world. And you are in my what would the web have been if Google hadn't come along to make it sensible? I mean, before you guys were born, I was using the web. And in the web, in that world, it was totally insane until Google came along and made it actually useful. So you've produced extraordinary value. You've produced extraordinary value on top of other people's content. All the value you produce, you produce because you're building on what other people did. So you are the quintessential company building this hybrid value. But for the content freely made available to you that you index, you wouldn't be able to produce what you produce. Well, you know, as this kind of anti Google stuff develops out there, I think it's a direct response to the feel the concern about the extent to which you transform the sharing into commercial value. I'm all for it. Like I want to figure out ways to support it. So you know, I've been working arguing in favor of the Google Book search project, which are, which I think is a brilliant, absolutely brilliant contribution to the world. Right. But I have felt in those arguments, exactly this point, that the negotiation of the hybrid economy here is really hard. And though you figured out brilliantly how to index the Internet, I'm not yet sure you figured out how to negotiate that hybrid debate.

Do you foresee this Creative Commons license actually becoming attached to technology to enforce it, like digital rights management? It seems as if DRM is a technology for enforcement of the one or other's license.

Right. So I think it's very important to distinguish between digital rights expression and digital rights management. So we're all for expression, we're not for management. Of course you could say, well, it's a very easy thing to attach management to expression. But we build into our licenses an anti DRM clause that actually blocks the ability to use the licensed content in a way that's inconsistent with the freedoms. And no DRM I know of respects fair use. So that basically means you can't use it to enforce the license content. Now I think it's important for the technology to express the freedoms automatically so you can begin to gather content easily on the basis of the freedoms and you begin to know how to negotiate the freedoms in a machine readable way, not by reading some blather written by a second year law associate that's totally incomprehensible to everybody. So that's very important. But the critical thing is not to add the technology into that expression because the technology will always be technology that disables interoperability at the content level layer. So interoperability here means the ability to take content and mix it in and put it with something else. Well, all DRM now is designed to make fragile or too fragile content and to disable its ubiquitous sharing interoperability. So that's why that's one important function reason to be opposed to the drm. But we think that if you had the middle stage of digital rights expression made it easy for people to know and respect the underlying rights, there's no need to for most cases to add the other dollop of management technology on top. Now some cases, sure, right. You know, you want to move the Hope diamond through New York City, you're going to have, you know, very high security around it. And so maybe the first release of a Hollywood movie, you're going to attach DRM to it to make sure that you can fund the average $50 million it costs to make a Hollywood movie. But though I think my articles are pretty valuable, I don't think my articles need the kind of security that a Hollywood movie needs. So I put my articles out there in a free and open way so that people can do whatever they want with them. Because I think that's more appropriate to.

The kind of creativity. When you look ahead, do you foresee that government policy and enforcement of copyright is going to become more and more strict, or do you actually predict that there will be?

Well, not in the next 10 years. They won't get it right, at least in the next 10 years. And that's because neither the Democrats nor the Republicans see any issue here. They all see it the way Hollywood wants them to see it. And the technology companies have been pathetic in uniting around a message that makes it clear that there's Another side to this. And the other side is not communism, right? I mean I all the time get called a communist and Bill Gates referred to Creative Commons as communism. And then the very next day his press people brought him out so he could say, oh no, no, I didn't mean Creative Commons was communist. But the point is people think in our current culture that any way any questioning of IP means you're opposed to IP, so kind of IP McCarthyism reigns in our culture. And that's why I think before. So I shifted all of my efforts from legal policy work into Creative Commons movement like work so that a wider range of ordinary people begin to have the sensibility of the distinctions and importance of free culture. So that eventually 10 years from now, when my kids are 21, which would be 20 years from now, but at least then we'll begin to have a chance of real legal reform. But right now I think it's hopeless. I think we're going to have time.

For either two or three more questions. So here I have someone at the mic and someone back there. So aren't you setting up at least somewhat of a straw man argument with the read write culture, at least the way that you described it? Because you're talking about it in terms of like remixing copyrighted content. But I think a large part of it, in fact my, even the largest part of it is all just user creating content. A lot of the videos on YouTube are just user submitted videos. Their own video camera or all the blogs out there, all the content, MySpace, Friendster, those are all just complete user created content that have no copyright controls on them to start with. And I don't see necessarily a conflict that you set up between trying to create a type model back then content. So in that sense, I mean isn't there, isn't that kind of content go up and just become thriving even if the copyrighted content doesn't become remix in part doesn't necessarily become a wild no matter what.

Well you tell me what that content is. If you go to Google and you search Jesus will survive, the first entry is the Google video of that Jesus will survive thing. That Jesus will survive thing is incredible user generated content. It also has Gloria Gaynor's song in it. When I showed this video in Hollywood at an event with a bunch of Hollywood lawyers that triggered the very next day Universal sending a letter to this producer that said you're violating our copyrights. Take it down no more. Now they haven't filed a lawsuit yet. We have to represent them because obviously I've Caused some trouble here. But. But the point is, in Google video and in YouTube video, these user generated content has all sorts of other content built into it. That's within the category of what I call remix. Not just the kind of DJ Danger Mouse, real remix, but anybody who's using culture as part of their production of culture. Now I'm sure that there's a bunch of YouTube videos and Google videos that are just sort of somebody walking in a field with butterflies. They're only people producing content. But even there I think that's read right because those people producing content in that context are still producing for the sharing economy. They post it up in Google or in YouTube and want other people to get access to it. And they're not doing it in the read only way where they're saying you pay me to get access to this or I'm blocking you unless you get. They're doing it in the ethic of sharing. Like I produce, I share, I give it to other people. I want you to get access to it. I want to be able to get your stuff too. That's the logic of that economy. So in that broader sense of people who are producing to be creating and consuming and sharing, that's what I'm thinking of as read write. One core part is, you're right, an exception, the DJ Danger Mouse. But in the broader sense, all of that is still afflicted by the kind of problems that I'm talking about, both the copyright problems and the corporate control problems, both of them are vulnerable to that kind of problem threat.

It seems like your sharing economy is predicated upon free access to at least.

The read only economy.

I was wondering what kind of shared economy you think would be built on a read economy that doesn't have broad and full and can I say uncensored access to information.

Yeah. So if the read only economy or the read only culture implements what all the content owners wanted to implement, which is robust DRM linked all the way down to the platform layer. So basically your ability to use this content is as the technology determines that's going to radically weaken the potential for the read write culture to take off. Now it weakens it in two ways, one technically and the other culturally. Technically, because I mean all of you sit here and say, what's the problem? I can hack around it, but you know, 99% of people can't change the time on their VCR. Right. So they aren't going to be able to hack around those kinds of controls. So that's technically. But more important is Culturally, you know, I think this kind of media is what writing is in the 21st century. So where do we teach writing? We teach it in schools. So you have kids in schools learning how to write. They read Fitzgerald, they read Hemingway, they say write an essay, creative writing essay. It's about taking quotes from each of them, mixing together, saying something intelligent. But in this current economy, current culture, political culture, you can't have a school teaching people how to do that with video. You can't have a school teaching people how to do that with music. Because in video and music the norm is that's all copyrighted infringement. So if the read only Internet is locked down and expressing that control, then you won't have this being spread in all sorts of institutions where it needs to spread. And you won't have businesses built up around the ability for people to do this kind of user generated content. Because if doing that user generated content requires circumventing the copy protection system, that's a felony in the United States. That's the digital malam copyright act. Right. So I think the extent to which it gets locked down fundamentally weakens the opportunity of the read write Internet.

So sometimes the content is locked down by digital protection and other times it's locked down by governments or other forces that are also limiting content creation. So I was wondering more about the times when the content isn't limited by the creators, but by their tech team.

So. Right. So I actually think the government is a much less efficient DRM entity than Hollywood will be. Right. So yeah, China is a perfect example of this. There's all sorts of stuff that can't happen in China, you can't do in China. And there's all sorts of energy devoted to finding ways around that. And that energy actually engenders a very strong read write culture around this kind of stuff. This is a common phenomenon. I remember after Soviet Union used to do constitutional law around the Soviet Union. And after the Soviet Union fell, I went back and talked to poets and they used to describe how they hated the post Soviet world because in the Soviet world it was illegal to write poetry that had more than two meanings attached to it. Right. You can only have double meanings with your poetry, you couldn't have triple meanings with your poetry. And so you had to be really creative and, and figuring out how to write. But in the free world they could write whatever the hell they wanted. And that was just boring. Right. So I think that there's actually a way in which censorship is so. Censorship as in government censorship is so universally reviled that it really unites people in an attempt to resist it. Now of course really costly to resist it in certain places, right in China. It's unbelievable the consequence of that kind of behavior. But still there's a norm against resisting it in the context of content here, at least I haven't seen it yet. People all get all upset when Sony BMG puts something on the CDs to make it so it controls how many times you can copy the cd. A virus that controls your machine, or at least a Windows machine, not an Apple machine, but when Apple itunes does the same thing, releases the content that is regulated in exactly the same way. Nobody complains at all. Some people EFF does, I'm on the board of eff, but nobody else complains about it. They think it's a normal thing to do. So we don't call that censorship. But why is that control not thought of critically in the same way as it is with the cd? So it might be that it develops to be the same. But I think ultimately, to the extent we're trying to enable this kind of user generated content, broadly, it's the content industry's control that will be in the long term the one to worry about. More.

So from a normative perspective, how should copyright be changed? Is it sort of broadening fair use? Is it sort of to shift the default rule from a property rule to liability rule or SIDS for reducing the term of copyright? And I wonder if you can comment on that.

Yeah. So I think the biggest mistake of copyright is that for most of the history of copyright, it's an exception. It regulates content as the exception. So in the United States, until 1978, you wanted copyright, you had to register the copyright, you had to renew the copyright after an initial term, you had to mark your work with a little C in a circle. And, and if you didn't take any of those steps, you didn't get copyright. So it was an opt in system. And the vast majority of work, you know, creative work, was never regulated by copyright. Indeed, of published work, probably just 50% took the steps to go through the registration. And then of the ones that went through the steps to take registration, probably 80 to 90% did not renew the copyright after the initial terms. So the point is a vast amount of content is just unregulated by the law of copyright because the law of copyright is opt in and most don't opt in. In 1978, long before digital technologies came along, lawyers said, well, it's too much of a hassle to have to opt in. Let's just presume everything is covered by copyright. So they changed the system from an opt in to an opt out system. And so automatically, when you do a doodle on a piece of paper, automatically the work is regulated by copyright. It's regulated by copyright whether or not you register it, whether or not you mark it with a little C. And for the full life of the copyright term without any requirement to renew it, the life of the copyright term now is 95 years for corporate work, life of the author, plus 70 years for individual work, which for Irving Berlin's most famous work would have been a copyright term of 140 years. So the point is, presumptively, everything is regulated now. And there's no easy way to even figure out who the copyright owners are to ask permission to use the word. So this is the most compelling thing about Google Books. I think of the 18 million books you want to scan, 16% are in the public domain, 9% are in copyright and in print, 75% are in copyright and out of print. Now, if you needed to go ask permission of the 75% before you can include them in the Google book search library, it would be impossible, because being out of print means we don't know who the owners are. There's no registry, there's no simple way to identify. You don't even know who to ask. So we have this amazingly inefficient property system governing all creative work, whether somebody wants it or not, for 100 years. And that's the fundamental problem here. We need to find ways to carve it back, to make it apply where there's a real need for it to apply. And I think there's a need to apply. I'm not against copyright. I think it's essential in the, the digital age, but it's not essential for a wide range of culture. It's essential for those bits of culture that need to protect the commercial advantage associated with that culture. So things like renewing some kind of formalities, reducing the term, requiring affirmative steps to maintain a copyright, those are the sort of steps that I think would rationalize the system pretty dramatically. But the core thing is not to make the law trigger off of a technically accidental feature of the platform, which is that copies are made. For all of the history of copyright law, at least in the United States, between 1790 and 1909, copyright law didn't regulate copies. It regulated publishing and regulated things like performances or making a derivative work. But copying was not in the law, publishing was, which means you could copy anything down by hand, you want, without being technically regulated by the law. In 1909, copying is introduced into the law, but it's actually a mistake. It's a wrong way to describe what they were intended to do. They didn't mean to extend it to all copying. They were actually talking about what you do to sculptures. That means, though, when the law starts talking about copying, as the technology of copying becomes more ubiquitous, more things are regulated by the law. Not because any congressman thought to himself, oh yeah, we ought to be regulating, but merely because the law technically is applying to copying. And lots of technology for copying expands well again in the analog world, even then, it didn't matter much. Like, what were the consumer copying technologies? Xerox machines, Right. So they figured out how to deal with libraries, and that was fine. But the digital world comes along, and now copying is as common as breathing. It's no longer an efficient trigger to figure out what activity ought to be regulated versus what activity shouldn't be regulated, regulated. It's now ubiquitous. So the idea that copying is what makes the law turn on is insane. And yet, especially in Europe, they continue to extend the control of copyright law over copying. So they explicitly push, in Europe, the idea that even temporary copies in the caches or in servers as you send something across the network are technically triggers of copyright law, and you need to negotiate rights to engage in all of that kind of activity. Now, any sane person, especially people like you who work with this technology all the time, recognize that's just insane. It's an insane way to design a copyright system. Yet the law pushes more and more in that direction. So what you need is people who recognize we need regulation of copyright law. Let's just make it make sense of the technology. And just like it would be insane to say you've got to pay a tax every time you breathe, it's insane to say you have to pay a tax every time you copy. In the context of of a digital network, there's other ways you should pay taxes. I think we should pay lots more tax. Especially your founders should pay much more taxes than they pay right now. So I'm not against taxes, but I think that the idea that you tax breathing, except in Terminator, like movies or movies that he's in, the idea that you tax breathing is insane, just like making taxing copies is insane in the real world.

Well, thank you very much.

Thanks.