Lessig Blog Archives

Thanks to everyone who responded to my request yesterday. My inbox and comment box are now deluged with fantastic ideas, and I’m now way behind in responding. Please don’t stop with the ideas. I’ll catch up in the replies soon. But thank you. I am astonished by the generosity.

Aaron once wondered what he should do with his life. Option 4 was answer email (3069 in his inbox). This is a worthy discipline for anyone, though we need a norm of slack for email. I’d love a script that posted the number of emails in my inbox and the average time to reply just so I don’t inadvertently insult someone who’s used to conversing with Mitch.

More soon, but thanks again for the help. And to pass the time quickly, I recommend Cory‘s book.

I’ve been hiding away in Japan working on a book that’s tentatively titled “Free Culture”–“free” as in the verb. I’d be grateful for any help with two questions that are continued below.

(1) Seeking an analogy: I’d love to find an example from popular culture (e.g., at TV show, or famous movie, or cartoon) that would be a useful analogy for an idea that is hard to get across. Here’s the hard-to-get-across version: I’m trying to give people a sense of how the reach of copyright has changed for totally unintended reasons. Because the internet is a digital network, every action on the network is a copy; because copyright law gets triggered whenever there is a copy, it follows that every action on the network is potentially subject to copyright law.

The analogy would be to a story where some slight technical change happens, and it has a radical change for some unrelated feature. I’ve a vague sense of a batman episode, where the villain drops a chemical into the water and the world changes dramatically. Something like that. I tried an analogy in my last book which is good but old: the framers of the constitution gave Congress power over “interstate commerce,” intending that to leave lots of exclusive legislative jurisdiction to the states; but because the economy has changed, and the range of commerce “in or affecting” interstate commerce has increased, the scope of exclusive jurisdiction in the states has shrunk.

I’d love a sexier example of the same form: technology changes, and the very nature of some unrelated feature changes radically.

(2) copyright law’s effect on weblog space:

I’ve got some nice examples of how copyright law has interacted (to good and bad ends both) with weblog space. But I’d be grateful for any examples of weblog content being restricted or supported by copyright law.

Thanks in advance. You can email me or post below.

Matt wonders what one does with 100 mbs. Great question. In Korea, where, as I was told, copyright laws are “immature,” they are free to stream TV to their computers. That uses chunks of bandwidth, and creates great new competition for video. (If only we (or Canada) could be “immature” again.)

But remember Mr. Gates’ thought about how much memory a PC would need: 640k. Give us bandwidth, and we’ll find a way to use it.

As cable companies continue to increase the cost of broadband service, and as telcom monopolies are strengthened by changes in FCC policy, it is now absolutely clear what the broadband endgame will be in the US: wireless. Think of a city where every single street light is a node in a mesh (for an example, see meshnetworks), and thus where the cloud of the internet sits on the street like the fog in San Francisco. For almost nothing, cities could provide IP light, as cities provide street lights. Neutral, end-to-end, fast, and cheap. (Apologies for this uncharacteristically optimistic post. Just a preview of the moot.)