LESSIG, DELONG AGREE: RETURN TO COPYRIGHT REGISTRATION NEEDED
It was billed by sponsor Progress & Freedom Foundation as a battle royal, with PFF Senior Fellow James DeLong, outspoken intellectual property advocate, squaring off against Stanford U. Prof. Lawrence Lessig, who Thurs. released his latest book. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity argues in favor of free flow of information -- including file transfers on P2P networks, a technology DeLong has denounced for promoting theft. But they agreed Thurs. at a National Press Club debate that copyright reform was necessary in light of the Internet.
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Specifically, DeLong backed a Lessig proposal, embodied in legislation by Rep. Lofgren (D-Cal.), that would require a copyright holder to register the content after 50 years at a cost of $1, or see it enter the public domain. DeLong raised the point while praising Lessig for introducing it during his failed attempt in Eldred v. Ashcroft to overturn the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. DeLong also faulted MPAA’s Fritz Attaway, who was in the back of the room, for opposing Lofgren’s bill.
During Q&A, Attaway said his member companies could easily register works after 50 years and pay the $1 fee, but others wouldn’t find it so easy. “Copyright should not be restricted to the rich and empowered,” Attaway said. Lessig replied that anyone making money off copyrighted work after 50 years and so would have an interest in extending that protection wasn’t a “poor starving artist.” He said the system would create a registry of copyrighted works, so those seeking use of the works could easily track the copyright holder.
It was this reduction in transaction costs of ensuring legal use of copyrighted material that drew DeLong to support the approach. He said “every other form of property” requires registration, from real property to patents and trademarks. With a smile, he added, “I'm a corporate toady; I don’t care about the poor.” DeLong shared Lessig’s concern about old films and other media that may be lost because the Bono Act prevents them from entering the public domain, and the cost of tracking down the copyright holder is prohibitive. DeLong called for a “salvage law” under which someone who found and restored an old work could get a financial return and an original owner who showed up would be compensated.
Lessig and DeLong differed on the need for a compulsory license, but not dramatically. DeLong said such an approach was unworkable, and Lessig agreed it would be in the long term. Lessig argued for some compensation system just for the next 5 years or so, because “this technology [P2P] isn’t going to be around forever.” Lessig said P2P works because storage is cheap but bandwidth is expensive. He said the FCC through spectrum reform and other steps is helping reduce the cost of bandwidth, so in the near future everyone will enjoy “ubiquitous broadband”;
at that point storage becomes uneconomical as content is available immediately from somewhere else under profitable business models.
Lessig said the main argument behind the “free culture” promoted in his book is that “before you're allowed to invade liberty or free speech you'd better have a damned good reason.” He said “free culture” didn’t mean content should always be free. But DeLong said many in the “free culture” movement didn’t focus on “the morality of reciprocity,” namely that content producers deserve to be compensated and need to be to given incentives to produce more works. Lessig argued against a “black and white” view of pay and free content, saying that’s “framing it in this idiot’s way.”
DeLong repeatedly made clear he didn’t lump Lessig in with those taking what he viewed as more-extreme positions in the “free culture” movement, but twice took issue with Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for producing “rhetoric in favor of property” while opposing digital rights management and suits against unauthorized file-sharers. Lessig is on the boards of EFF and Public Knowledge, but didn’t come to the defense of either organization.
PFF took the opportunity at the debate to announce the launch of a new website devoted to intellectual property issues, ipcentral.info. Both Lessig and PFF have blogs, and DeLong and Lessig said it was a debate between them on their blogs that led to the physical debate Thurs.