How Intellectual Property Laws Are Holding Us Back Samantha Spott CIS

 “Intellectual property refers to creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce.”  Most of intellectual property concerns copyright  This affects how we download music and movies, internet parody and satire, as well as business models and software coding.

 Copyright laws began in the 1800’s.  The initial idea was to protect limited ownership rights to works and their creators for a limited timeframe.  Since then, “limited” time has expanded to 95 years, and is renewable through Congress.  Now, virtually all copyright laws are permanent.

 “The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;  The nature of the copyrighted work;  Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and  The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.”

 Intellectual property rights require an imbalanced relationship with the state and by extension bureaucracies. It burns more energy and capital protecting the last invention rather than building the next one.  Intellectual property rights in essence are oxymoronic in capitalism. The culture that allows if not requires innovation.

 The free culture movement began with the free software movement.  Free software gives the user the freedom to share, study and modify it.  Currently, people use proprietary software that prohibits these actions. If you make a copy and give it to a friend, if you try to figure out how the program works, you could be fined or put in jail.

 “Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria:  1. Free Redistribution  2. Source Code  3. Derived Works  4. Integrity of The Author's Source Code  5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups  6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor  7. Distribution of License  8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product  9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software  10. License Must Be Technology-Neutral”

 “The mission of the Free Culture movement is to build a bottom-up, participatory structure to society and culture, rather than a top- down, closed, proprietary structure. Through the democratizing power of digital technology and the Internet, we can place the tools of creation and distribution, communication and collaboration, teaching and learning into the hands of the common person” Students for Free Cultue Mission Statement

 “We believe that culture should be a two-way affair, about participation, not merely consumption.”  Technology has an amazing part to play in the advancement of our culture.  It liberates creativity and democratizes the ability to use, edit, and re-imagine digital content. Anyone can be a creator.

“As I explain in the pages that follow, we come from a tradition of “free culture”—not “free” as in “free beer”… but “free” as in “free speech,” “free markets,” “free trade,” “free enterprise,” “free will,” and “free elections.” A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow- on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a “permission culture”—a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.” Taken from the introduction to Free Culture : How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock down Culture and Control Creativity.

A photo from the above lecture: Left: Lawrence Lessig, Steven Johnson, and Jeff Tweedy. Right: Crowd.

Ballou, Brenden. "Manifesto." Students for Free Culture Nov Bridges, Mary. "Berkman Briefing: Rip, Mix, and Burn - Lessig's Case for Building a Free Culture." Berkman Center for Internet and Society. 18 Feb Harvard University. 14 Nov Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture : How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: Penguin P HC, The, Radcliffe, Mark, ed. "Open Source Initiative." Open Source Initiative. 19 Mar Nov "RIAA v. The People: Five Years Later." Electronic Frontier Foundation. Sept Nov "What is free software and why is it so important for society?" Free Software Foundation. 14 May Nov "What is Intellectual Property?" World Intellectual Property Organization. 12 Nov Restart!