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>> lawrence lessig argues against the current state of copyright laws. he says the laws are outdated, don't reflect the sharing of information on the internet and stifle creativity. the carnegie council for ethics and international affairs in new york city hosted this event. it lasts about an hour. >> thank you very much. i hope you don't mind if i put that down. i confess i feel a little bit lost. i usually make presentations with the mack version of power point keynote.

indeed, in the last five years, no one has ever asked me to speak without my keynote presentations. now they don't want me, they just want the keynote presentations, so i was a little skeptical that anyone would be here today. i thought this was a joke. i thought i would be invited to speak without it, but i'm glad of to have the opportunity. so this book is about two moments of hope, and one inexcusable fear. the first moment of hope is inspired by a story of some testimony that i read, testimony given in 1906 by john philip sousa before the united states congress. in 1906, the united states copyright law was behind the protections granted to copyright owners in europe, in particular,

it didn't grant any protection for work that was mechanically reproduced, so if you took a john philip sousa composition and you performed it and recorded it and sold the recordings, john philip sousa didn't get any money. so sousa came to washington for the purpose of trying to get washington to expand the copyright to match the europeans, but he launches on to an extraordinary attack in this testimony against what he calls the "talking machine" by which of course he announced the record player, phonograph and eventually he would complain the same way about radio and his attack had a very distinctive character. sousa said when i was a young boy, in the summer evenings, you'd hear young people togeth

together, singing the songs of the day or the old songs. today you hear these machines going night and day. we will not have a vocal chord left, sousa said, the vocal cords will be eliminated by a process of evolution as was the tale of man when he came from the ape, so this is a vision of a certain kind of culture that this professional is celebrating. it's amateur culture, it's a culture where people participate in the creation and recreation of their culture. that was central to his vision of what culture should be, and not because he as a professional thought these animals would be better producers of culture. he thought they would be better than they. but it was very important to him, almost in a jeffersonian sense, to imagine these people creating the culture around them as they consumed the culture around them. now i use that vision of culture

and describe it using modern computer term following as a kind of read-write culture. it's a culture where people read, consume, but they also feel empowered, entitled to write, to create in response to what they consume and i contrasted that vision of culture to the opposite in computer terminology, what we could call a read only culture, a culture where what people do is just simply consume. where they don't feel entitled or empowered to take what they consume and do anything with it. they feel like their job is to be a couch potato, to sit there and just see or listen and do nothing more. and sousa's fear was that's who we would become. now, of course, he was right, that's who we did become, the history of the 20th century is extraordinary history of concentration of the creativity of our culture, and never before in the history of human culture had its production become has

concentrated, never bore before as professionalized, never before had the participation of ordinary people in the creation and spreading of culture been as effectively displace and displaced for exactly the reasons he said because of these in fernal machines and you think about the contrast of the 20t 20th century and every century before. and it is striking. in the 19th century and every century before, the ordinary ways of producing and spreading culture were the sorts of things that ordinary people did. it's not that everybody could play the piano, but there wasn't anything weird about being able to play the piano or the violin and indeed, it was part of what it meant, to learn to produce in exactly that way. the distinctive forms of cultural production were in this sense, democratic. but for the 20th century, some of the most important forms of cultural production were not in this sense democratic. it wasn't the case that in the 1930's, it was normal for people

to make films. it wasn't the case that it was normal to record a record and to spread it or create a radio station and to broadcast it. these were things that some people did, but normal people didn't do this stuff and we had a culture that developed that was very different from the culture of the 19th and centuries with before, where it separated between what normal people did and what a certain cultural elite, i don't mean that in a negative sense, just in a descriptive sense, an elite did, and that contributed to exactly what sousa was fearing, this sense that there was some that were entitled to create and spread their creativity and the rest of us who were entimed simply to consume. when you see the story like that, the most distinctive and one of the most exciting things about the internet is that it's returning, restoring the read-write culture that sousa celebrated. because once again, all the forms of cultural production that are around us are

democratic. the sort of thing that anybody can do. if you have a 16-year-old kid who doesn't know how to make a movie, there's something wrong with your child. we have come to place where it is completely ordinary to imagine that we will express ourselves in all sorts of different ways and we grow up making mixed tapes, our kids grow up remixing the music they listen to, the whole way they interact with others is about creating and sharing their creativity, they're expected to do this. now, one of the reasons i like to make presentations with the technology is i get to show you some of these things and you don't spend a lot of time in these spaces, you might not even have a sense of what it is. there is an extraordinary phenomenon developing on youtube, it's a sort of call-in response. so for example, you'll have one group of kids that will film them dancing to one song and then 10 or 12 or 20 other people will dance to the same song,

showing their own version of the dance to the song, it's a kind of increasing competition, or seem people will take video and remix it with some audio track in some hilarious way, in this way in which the technology allows and other people will do the same sort of thing in response, so it's a call and response, that increasingly defines how this space gets used and it is exactly the equivalent of what sousa spoke of when he spoke of the young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs, except now they're not singing on corners, they're singing into their little cameras on their computers and sharing it with everybody around the world. this is an extraordinarily valuable development. it's something we should celebrate, we should encourage, but in fact, it's something which is increasingly regulated. i came back from hong kong two weeks ago, and i was told a

story in hong kong about a kid who took a video that he had made and he synchronized it with a music track of one of his favorite musicians and posted it on his web site. he wasn't selling, it was just a commentary on some local political event. he was criminally prosecuted for this act and he was cripple family prosecuted pursuant to statutes that this government had insisted china adopt in order to comply with our vision of what intellectual property regulations are and the chinese government says by prosecuting this person, criminally, they're setting an example for everybody so that nobody will do there and you say what is this that we're trying to stop our children from doing here? what is the criminal act that is outrageous for us to imagine our children pursuing in the secrecy of their own bedroom. the criminal act is to express themselves creatively and share that creativity with others in this amateur way and that's

again, the point i want to take from sousa. sousa recognized that a copyright policy both has to support the professionals and the amateur. it both has to create the incentives necessary for the professional, that's why he was there in washington, he was trying to get them to change the incentive, so he would get more money from his creativity, but it was also important to him to leave a certain space free for the amateur and to insist that it be free. indeed, he was ridiculed by one congressman, congressman frank courier, who was a copyright skeptic. he didn't believe, he thought copyright was already too powerful, an courier said in response to sousa's row manhattan sizing young people together, singing the songs of the day or the old songs, isn't that forbidden under our copyright act and sousa said what are you talking about? and he said well, it's a public performance, isn't it required

that they have permission from the copyright owner to engage in this and sousa evokes this extraordinary sense of outrage. i never thought it was a crime to get together and sing, sousa says, and it's in intuition that i think we've lost, that the idea that there should be an exemption, a space of freedom for the amateur to engage in the participation with our culture is somehow ignored in the current regime of copyright, the current regime presumes the amateur is like the professional and needs to be regulated in the same way and so the first point that i wanted this book to try to convey is the opportunity that these technologies have given us to restore in some sense the way culture had always been except for this one bizarre century, the 20th century. now the second part of this moment of hope is more economics.

it focuses more on an economic opportunity, not a cultural opportunity. and this is what i refer to in the title as the hybrid. or the hybrid economy and to see the hybrid economy, i have to describe the two things that the hybrid is a mix of. so the first thing the hybrid is a mix of is the traditional commercial economy which you all understand is the economy where what you get is a function of money, so you go into the grocery store, you give them a dollar, they give you two bananas, that's the trade, quid pro quo and we understand in that context that money is the term of the expression, it's the way we speak and it's completely appropriate for the store to say, i'm sorry, i'm only going to sell you one banana for a dollar today or to give awe discount to get you to buy more bananas. that's the natural way that economy functions, but we sometimes forget, there's another economy out there, a sharing economy. it's an economy in the sense that it exists over time and it only exists when you make certain kinds of exchanges in a way that's reciprocal, or at

least we hope that's the way it exists, but in that type of economy, money is not the way in which you speak. so you have friends, you might get together with your friends for lunch. you might say this is a great lunch, let's have lunch next week, if your friend responds i don't think so, how about if i give you $100 instead? it's not just unusual, it would radically change the nature of your relationship or if you start mining to your friend about -- whining to your friend about whatever problem you have and your friend says i'm sorry, i charge $200 for this advice, it would change the relationship or think about our romantic relationships. if in the middle of a romantic relationship, one person were to offer the other a bunch of money to continue the romantic relationship through the evening, it's not just that one would find that out of place, one would appropriately either be turned on or outraged at this

particular way in which the relationship had been redefined, so the thing is to recognize, we have these, what i call, sharing economies in our life. and people celebrate them and want to protect them, and indeed, this is not a conservative-liberal thing. it's not just that the of conservatives love sharing economies. the whole regulation against prostitution is a regulation to protect a certain kind of relationship from money, to keep it -- keep money out of it, because the sharing economy there inside of that relationship is to important according to some people's visions of this. now, in the internet, we've got both commercial and sharing economies. commercial economy, things like amazon or dell computers, you pay your money, you get your stuff. we also have sharing economies, like wikipedia. wikipedia, extraordinary site of thousands of people, for free spending an enormous amount of time trying to make this

dictionary -- this encyclopedia one of the most important contributions to public knowledge that we've got. if you started paying people in wikipedia, i think it's plausible that we would get less quality in the work that wikipedia does. it's something about participating for the good of participating that in expires a certain kind of creativity and if you changed it into a simple purchase of time, people would treat it differently, so that economy is a sharing economy, dell computers is a commercial economy. but what i wanted this book to suggest is that we recognize the hybrid that's developing between the two. increasingly, we see businesses, commercial economies, that are trying to leverage sharing economies to produce value for them, and sometimes the other way around. sometimes you see sharing economies that are trying to leverage commercial economies to create stability for the sharing economies. now the first is more familiar.

let me give you some examples. think about flicker. flicker is an on-line photo sharing site. it developed an enormously powerful community of people who wanted to share their photographs, to make their photographs available for others and to share the knowledge about how to produce great photographs. well, this site of course existed initially as simply a relationship between people trying to share. that was a sharing economy, but with yahoo! bought it, yahoo! wanted to leverage that sharing activity into value for yahoo!, and indeed, it did. it's one of yahoo! most successful business venture to buy this particular sharing economy. so you have a sharing activity that's been leveraged for commercial benefit. or there's an on-line virtual world, which is second life. if you've ever even second life,

it's this beautiful version of green grass and oceans. people then started populating this space in virtual characters and started building there, cities, houses, or cars, or bars, or all sorts of stuff that's in the real world, they built there for free. indeed, they paid for the freedom to build those things there and then they spend an enormous amount of time creating communities in these spaces. now all of that activity between these people in second life is part of the sharing economy. they're doing this exchange in just a social sharing way, but the activity is designed to create value back to linden labs, the creator of second leave. george lieu cas lucas wanted tos 30-year-old series, "star wars," and excite a new generation of kids about it, so he created a "star wars" markup site and what

the "star wars" markup site was to take clips and make it available for kids to take and remix, upload their own music, upload their own pictures, mix them together and create mini lucas movies. so again, what lucas was trying to do was produce a world where people were sharing their activities and excitement around this series of films, but by doing that, he wanted obviously to leverage that excitement into more value for lucas. now, the point you see is that this is a newly empowered kind of economy that i think the internet is supporting. i'm not saying it never existed outside the internet, by the internet makes it more feasible for a wider range of commerce and indeed, once you see the model of the hybrid, it's hard to see any interesting internet business that isn't actually trying to deploy the hybrid, so think about amazon. is amazon just a commercial economy?

because so much of the value of amazon comes from people for free contributing to amazon, reviews of books to try to signal to other people which books they should buy and which books they shouldn't. people devoting their time to make the company more profitable, or even a company like microsoft recognizes this. microsoft has an enormous customer support center, which is driven if large part by a user-generated content group, where people spend an extraordinary amount of time helping other microsoft users use microsoft products. these people do it for free. they just sit there and they answer questions on these microsoft websites, to help other people use microsoft products. so instead of going down to their church on sunday and helping with a bake sale or something like that, they spend their time trying to help microsoft make more money. now, it's a bizarre thing, but

it's not an accident. there's something called community technology group inside of microsoft, a guy named mark smith runs it, he's a brilliant former academic, and they devote an efor must amount of energy to tracking the health of communities. they have ways to measure, whether the communities are interacting with each other in a healthy, productive way and if they are, then they encourage them. if they're not, they figure out what they can do to encourage it, but that activity of encouraging and fostering the healthy community translates into more profit for microsoft, because they're more than half a million microsoft users. i think this vision is a good one. it's something we should understand and try to encourage, because what it does is enable a commercial platform upon which a social activity gets built. balls the stuff going on in the networking site is the human

interaction we should be encouraging, and if the commercial framework makes it possible, then more power to commercial framework. commercial entities are just beginning to figure out how they should relate to the sharing economies, so one model of this i think of as the darth vader model, relates directly to the lucas story. if you read the terms of service on the george lucas site, george lucas is a lawyer, as said that when that kid takes the lucas movies and remixes it, george lucas owns all the rights. indeed, if the kid compose its music and uploads it to george lucas's site and remixes it with george lucas's movies, george lucas has a worldwide perpetual free right to exploit that music to his own advantage, without paying the kid a dime. essentially, this is share cropping in the digital age that he has created, and you can understand why he did it. the lawyers who george lucas

employs are people that, you know, i've trained and other people from my university have trained and how do we train hollywood lawyers? we train them to be as aggressive as they possibly can, to take all the rights they possibly can. that's their job. if they leave anything on the table, they've failed. the point to recognize is that attitude is going to be destructive. counterproductive in this new hybrid economy. what we need to do is to encourage a way of thinking about the proper relationship between the commercial entity and the sharing economy or legislate or worry about anybody do it from a policy perspective. my prediction is that businesses that think about it in an appropriate way will be more successful than businesses that think about this in a traditional way. this is a way, it's a model for seeing how this edifying social activity can be supported in the context of the internet environment by commercial

activities. ok, those are the two moments of hope. there's the inexcusable fear. so we're about a decade into a war, actually, a lot of wars that we're in the middle of, but the one i want to focus on is the copyright wars. wars which my friend, the late jack havjack valente referred ts own terrorists, where the terrorists in this war are our children. now this children that's been waged since about 1998, has been waged to stop called peer to peer piracy, which is the sharing of files contrary to copyright laws, primarily music but increasingly movies. now i personally oppose peer to peer sharing. my book says peer to peer sharing is wrong and people should not engage in it, but the

one thing we should have learned is the war against peer to peer file sharing has been an utter failure. it has not in any sense reduced the bad behavior out there, peer to peer file sharing has gone up. indeed, the one thing we know from statistics is that peer to peer file sharers don't read supreme court opinions, because after the supreme court declared finally that this is an illegal activity, it continues just the same. so this activity, which all of your kids, but i won't ask you to identify yourself, engage in, this activity of getting content across the internet for free is not a regulateble activity without destroying the internet. we could stop it if we cut the fires, but if we don't cut the wires, we're not going to stop it. now what do you do when you're waging an unwinnable war? well, historically, americans have typically continued to wage the war for many, many years,

ever more vigorously against the enemy. and of course, that's what we did with prohibition for many years, that's what we've done in other literal wars. i hads great honor to debate jack valente and one of the people he write about in the back is jack valente and his argument in that debate was that the thing we should worry about the most is that a whole generation of our kids is growing up living life gents the law. -- against the law. he said what is the moral basis for this generation, when they think to themselves, it's totally ok just to go break the law, and they do break the law and they justify it in what they do, in the way they live their life. what will we become, he asks? now, i of course, was totally

impatient with that question. i was like, that's not the issue. the issue was what do the framers of the constitution think or what do we need to create incentive for production. i didn't care at all about the kids, but in the four years since -- five years since i published free culture, i've produced two kids -- or my wife actually did the producing, i did the diaper changing. and now i think that it's jack valente's question, which is the most important question. i think the really most important issue here is what do we do when we are producing a generation that lives their life against the law? how do we respond to that? jack valente's solution was to wage an ever more effective war against the enemy, to increasingly insist on stricter penalties again and again to get congress to pass few laws, to criminalize this behavior, to force universities to begin to be engaged i in the simple taskf

controlling how their kids use the internet. but my response is, we ought to stop suing our kids and find way to sue for peace, and to figure out a way to build a copyright system that doesn't criminalize an activity we know everyone is going to engage if, but which rewards are for their creativity and over the last 10 years, there have been an extraordinary number of such proposals. terry fisher at harvard i think has the most compelling description in a book called promises to keep a copyright regime, where we wouldn't try to control sharing, but we would find a way to measure who's more popular than who and compensate on the basis of that measurement, so that we could compensate the artist and not have a world of criminals. a whole bun of similar proposals have been made, including eff has a voluntary collective license. most surprisingly to me, last

week, judge pa tell, the california judge who oversaw the napster case, the first case that declared this activity to be illegal, she just gave an extraordinary speech where she said what the united states government has got to do is adopt a collective license for the peer to peer file sharing and stop calling it criminal, so the point is we just changed the law so the activity is not a criminal activity and copyright owners get paid for sharing their information. what if we had done that a decade something? what if at the very beginning of this, congress had done what of course we professors think they should always do, listen to the professors. i think most of the time that would be a terrible mistake for professors, but this time, what if they had done it, adopted a compulsory license a decade ago? one thing we know is artists would have got den more money, because over the last 10 years, artists have got nothing from peer to peer file sharing.

when they're sued, the money goes into a collective pot, artists don't get the money. we would have more competition in businesses because if rules had been clear, businesses would have been able to build business around these clear rules and more people would have been encouraged and we'd have lots of new innovation in the way culture gets spread, but number three, the point that was most important to jack and post important to me is we wouldn't have had a generation of criminals raised within our schools. we wouldn't have people who think to themselves, the laws a [beep] and i'm going to ignore the law and that's the thing we have to focus on now. we are not going to kill this form of creativity. we can only criminalize it. we're not going to stop our kids from producing in its way or make them passive the way we are growing up. we can only make themfy" rates" and the -- them "pirates." the kids live in this age of prohibition, they live

constantly against the law and sometimes that's appropriate. we need to stop them from drinking and driving. that's appropriate. but when we can regulate them differently, so that they're not criminals in their ordinary behavior, we need to do this, because living life against the law, is corrosive and corrupt difficult, against the very core of the democracy and if a democracy cannot order itself to encourage that kind of rational regulation, then there's a fundamental problem with the democracy. now, let me just end with, i was told i'm supposed to read, just to demonstrate i guess that i can read. well, i can read and i want to show you that i can. let me just read a couple sections from the conclusion of the book, which actually signals work that i'm doing after this series of book about i.t. this is going to be more interesting, the first couple sentences make it sound, i promise, so just bear with me

for a moment. the economic theory behind copyright justifies it as a tool to deal with what economists call the "problem of positive externalities." that's the boring part. a externality is in effect that if you play your music very loudly and wake your neighbors, your music is producing the externality, that's the noise. if you renovate your house and add a line of beautiful oak trees, your renovation produces an externality, that's the beautiful trees. beauty is a positive externality. people generally like to receive it. people especially at 3:00 a.m. don't like to receive it. copyright law deals with positive externalities, by creating incentives for people to produce great new work, which otherwise they wouldn't have because their work can be so simply shared and spread. now i say that economists call these externalities the problem of positive externalities. but you might rightly wonder,

why are positive externalities a problem? why isn't a positive good that expression should flow freely from one to foreall over the globe, this is quoting jefferson for improvement of his improvement? why isn't it peculiarly the internet's nature to be encouraged rather than restricted? well, the answer for the economist at least is that while there's no doubt -- it's no doubt that free is good, if everything were free, there would be too little incentive to produce, and if there's not enough monetary incentive to produce, the economist fears then not enough stuff is produced. in this book, i've sketched a bunch of obvious replies to the fears, there are a ton of incentives beyond money. there are 100 million blogs, only 13% of which run ads. look at wikipedia or free software, look at academics or scientists, we have plenty examples of creative expressions, different from the

one that britney spears employs. but i also made the other side of the argument, the sharing economy not withstanding, there is none that will be created without effective copyright regime. if anyone could copy a high quality hollywood film the moment it was released, no one could afford to make the $100 million blockbusters, if there's at least this one example, it's plausible there are others, movies, maybe music, maybe some kinds of books, dictionaries, or novels by john grisham. steven brewer gotten you'red at harvard with a piece that expressed deep skepticism about how broadly copyright needs to reach, but i believe it reaches in some places and for those cases without solving the problem of externality, we wouldn't have that kind of creativity, so to get hollywood movies, to get some kind of blockbuster films, to get justin timberlake-like music, we run a

copyright system. the system is a form of regulation. after a while it becomes big and expensive. federal courts and federal prosecutors spend a lot of money in enforcing the law copyright is. companies invest millions in technologies for protecting copyrighted material. universities run sting operations on their own students to punish or expel those to fail to follow copyright rules. we build this massive system of copyright regulation, to reach anyone who uses a computer to solve this problem of positive externalities. good for us. our government is working hard to solve this problem. but what about negative externalities? what does our government do about those? think for example about mercury, spewed as pollution and the exhaust from coal fired power plants. these two are externality, millions are exposed to dangerous levels of mercury because of this pollution, the planet teethters on a

catastrophic climate tipping point because of the carbon. whatever harm there might be in not having yet another star trek movie, the harms from these negative externalities are unquestionable and real. they cause real deaths. they will cause extraordinary dislocation in and economic harm. so given its keen interest in regulating to protect against uncompensated positive externalities, what precisely has our government done about uncompensated negative, harmful externalities? in the past 10 years, at a time with congress has passed at least 24 copyright bills and federal prosecutors and federal civil courts have been used to wage a war on piracy, so as to solve this problem of positive externality, what exactly has the government been doing about the negative externalities? not much. though president bush successfully deflected al gore's charge in 2000 by promising to tax carbon within elected, within two weeks of swearing in, he reversed himself and indicated he didn't think global warming was a problem and though

the clean air act regulates mercury and power plants, in 2003, the bush administration changed the regulation toss allow polluters to avoid having to reduce mercury. thus with these real and tangible harms caused biophage difficult externalities, the government has devoted precious resources to what many don't believe is a problem at all. so what gives? it's been a decade since i got myself into this fight against copyright extremism. throughout this book i argued that a decade's work has convinced me that this war is causing great harm to our society, knots only from losses in innovation, not only from stifling certain kinds of creativity, not only because it unjustifiablely limits stumly guaranteed freedom, but also and most importantly, because it is corrupting a whole generation of our children. we wage war against our children, and our children will become the enemy. they will become the criminals we name them to be and because there is no good evidence to support, that we will win this

war, there's all the reason in the world to stop these hostilities, especially when they are alternatives that advance the purported government interests without rendering a generation criminal, but there is insult to add to to injury. the point is not just that our government is waging a hopeless war. it is that our government does little to fight real harms, while it wastes real resources fighting problems that are not even clear harms, and why does it do that? the lesson a decade's work has taught me is that the reason has nothing to do with stupidity. it has nothing to do with ignorance. the simple reason we wage a hopeless war against our children is that they have less money to give to political campaigns, than hollywood does. the simple reason we do nothing while our kids are poisoned with mercury or the environment is sent over the falls with carbon is that our kids in our environment have less money to give campaigns than utility and oil companies do. our government is fundamentally irrational for a fundamentally rational reason -- policy follows not sense but dollars.

until that problem is solved, a whole host of problems will go unsolved. global warm willing, pollution, a skewed tax system, farm subsidies, our government is irrational, because in an important way, corrupt, and until that corruption is solved, we should expect little good from this government. this book is not about that corruption generally. all i have aimed for here is to get you to take one small step. whatever you think about global warming, the environment, tax gifts to favored corporations, subsidies that benefit only corporate farmers, at least think this. there is no justification for the copyright war that we now wage against our kids. demand that that war stop and once it's over, let's get on with the hard problem of crafting a copyright system that nurture the full range creativity and collaboration that the internet enables, one that builds upon the economic and creative opportunities of hybrids and remix creativity, one that decriminalizes the

sense of being 18. thanks very much. [applause] >> thank you very much. i think the verdict is thaw don't need a power point, because your argument was compelling the way it was. i would like to open the floor for questions and i just ask that you identify yourself and wait until the microphone comes to you. >> i'm a law professor and i would cold call that there's no questions. >> who pays the for the common -- [inaudible] >> well, under the different schemes that have been proposed, different people are going to pay, so eff, voluntary collective license, says basically, if you pay a flat

amount, meaning you the consum consumer, you're immune for any prosecution from file sharing. at the other extreme, terry fisher's proposal imagined taxing either at the internet service level or whatever is the efficient according to the economist, to raise the money necessary to compensate for the loss that's estimated to be produced by the file sharing. now, i think terry's proposal goes too far, because he wants to just whole hog replace the copyright system with this, but i think his proposal is perfectly adequate to think about it complimenting part of the copyright system that simply tries to compensator whatever loss you expect is being produced by pure peer to peer file sharing. at one point, it was said that peer to peer file sharing would destroy the marketplace and jack valente said how could you compete with free? but steve jobs has shown you can compete with free. his most successful itunes music

store is the number one place people get music now. charges for music, which every single song you could bet through the internet through peer to peer file sharing, so these economies exist in parallel and we just need to estimate what the cost of the one is and figure a way to compensate on the basis of that cost. >> i am john kirby, the president of public project. are there any voices in congress that are seeing things as subjects he willly as you are. is there anybody who is further down the line than just coming at it with a hammer? >> so when i launched the project creative commons, jack valente gave us a video in which he surprised the world by endorsing creative comments andy said, this is about artists

choosing what to do with their copyright and of course i support that choice by artists and then i said, i hope i don't ruin your project by endorsing it, larry, because of course, many people would think my endorse month is a reason not to support the project. i feel a little bit about the same way when i start thinking about naming members of congress who actually get it, because of course, that might be more harmful to them than helpful here, but let me just name one, who is rick boucher, from virginia. who has been an enormously important force in trying to get congress to recognize fair use and balance fair use in the context of this economy, and so he has been at least one person, i think there are others, that are important in this as well, but there are not enough. when congress does what it does

in this area, it often understands there's another side to this. how do we stop people from stealing? that is an important question, i'm not denying that. but there are other important questions, extremely important questions here. for example, every single book published in the history of publishing, we have available to us today. there's a vast majority of film produced in the 20th century that will literally disappear because it is burdened by copyright restrictions that will not expire until the film has literally turned into dust since it's nitrate based stock and it's even worse than a copyright problem. there's a fantastic democratic documentary filmmaker, charles guggenheim, who made the robert f. kennedy "remember" film, shown at the 1968 convention. his son, davis guggenheim who did al gore's movie, made the

barack obama film, shot at the 2008 democratic convention, so charles guggenheim, extraordinary filmmaker, has a daughter, grace guggenheim, who has spent literally 20 years of her life, clearing the rights so that his documentaries can be distributed. so why should it take 20 years to do that? the practice of making documentary films was that you would take 60 seconds from cbs and you wouldn't assert fair use to take those 60 seconds, because a lawyer said that's too complicated. you would get a license from cbs and the license from cbs would say number one, you agree, all your rights are governed by this license, you will claim no fair use rights. number two, this license gives you the rights to this film for five years, north american distribution, educational purposes. so at the end of five years, you can only distribute the film if you go back and get permission once again from the original rights holder. well, that's a possibly

expensive process and what this means is this whole archive of documentary films, which is the most direct way for our kids to understand those periods. our kids can read 10 books about the 1930's and nod understand one thing -- not understand one thing. all of this film will literally be unavailable for legal distribution because this system of regulation sits on top of it and locks it up in ways that make no sense from the perspective of what copyright was to be about. now it's those kind of problems that i think congress should be focusing on, yet congress is oblivious to those problems. the problems it wants to worry about is how do we stop kids from sharing illegally. >> a followup question. a followup question out of that question is as we watch obama staff different positions and so forth, which are the positions that we should be watching in this regard, and what kinds of

questions should be asked of those people, is it justice department, ftc, who is important here? >> well, i was a big supporter of barack and i was colleague of his in chicago and i knew him long before people could pronounce his name, and i helped the campaign think about technology policy, but i made a self-conscious decision, the campaign was happy about this, not to try to talk to them at all about i.t. issues, because i knew it would get them in trouble with traditional democratic communities to imagine that they were associating with me, indeed, huffington post, posted an e-mail from the american association of publishers, to all of their lobbyists, saying they had to get inside the administration to assure that the administration did not listen to the views of obama's friends, friend larry lessig and follow policies about i.t. reflected in my own views, so i have no reason to believe that the administration is going to

be much better than a republican administration would have been. indeed, in this campaign, the campaign was extraordinary progressive about copyright issues. the mccain campaign relied, as the obama campaign did, on youtube and there's this able with digital copyright act to get youtube to take down videos, if you just simply noticed that there's a copyright problem with it and youtube has the practice of if you're complained about three times, they shut down your channel, so this creates a strategic opportunity in political campaigns, where if you can get three complaints against your opponent's channel, it gets shut down. now maybe it's only shut down for a week, but in the middle of a campaign, a week is a long time, so mccain wrote youtube and said this is outrageous and you have to stop this. this is plainly fair use, all these things that you're doing and you have to stop shutting us down or taking these things down

merely because of a complaint and youtube's response was we can't distinguish, it's not our job to distinguish, we just obey the law and take it down. he was actually pretty good about that. i'm not predicting would who have been better, but if we wanted to get the administration to think about these issues, there are three things we should focus on. number one, the latest regulation that's dealing with piracy creates a copyright czar, person charged with prosecuting in this space. it's going to be very interesting who that person is. is that someone who is simply the hollywood type enhe forcer, -- enforcer, or is it somebody who has a broader understanding of these issues? number two, in theory, although it's not necessity, there's a registrar of copyrights that might need to be appoint. i mean, there's no reason that one has to expect that one steps aside, but if she does, there's a question of who that person is. the current registrar of

copyrights is someone i know met, even though i have met every single president of every he single media company and all these people, you know, in the actual commercial side, this government official has never thought it important to even talk to mow about these issues, so there's not a sensitivity i have think to the importance of these issues, at least in this office right now. the third place is in the context of patents, head of the p.t.o. again, the question is not whether you point to somebody who is against patents, but whether you appoint somebody who is sensitive in the way to help innovation an hinder innovation. now, that would be great to see progress in those three spaces, but again, i don't think this campaign fought about those issues and i don't see any reason to expect that there will be wonderful changes there. >> now, is anything being done wrong in this area. >> lots of things being done

wrong by the united states government, so the united states government has used such efor must power as a trading partner to force countries to sign bilateral agreements that impose stricter copyright rules on those countries than the international treaties require. so we have an international treaty, which is a trips agreement, complimenting the burn convention and those agreements try to set some balance and protection and in license or access. the united states government insists on stronger protections, and so they've forced countries like china and countries like australia and chile and korea and taiwan to engage in negotiations about stricter protections, one of them produced the result that i talked about in hong kong, of somebody being arrested for posting, remixing on the site. a country sitting there signing a trade agreement, can oppose

the i.p. part of this trade agreement, but it's they have going to make sense for them not to sign the agreement, regardless of what the i.p. stuff is. so all of the countries are signing these bilateral agreements, but what's striking to me is if i.p. is a balance, it's supposed to be a balance between protection and access and if the international agreements expressed a balance, it's just as bad to insist a country impose stricter agreements, than it is to have a country impose less strict agreements than the international agreements establishment it's just as bad to overprotect as to underprotect, yet the united states government goes out there and insists that everybody overprotects. now there are two countries that have been very important if resisting this. one is india and the other is brazil. and both of these countries have facilitated a developing -- a development agenda at world intellectual property organization and that developed agenda is beginning to rebalance

tease issues, -- these issues, by reminding wipo that it's a u.n. organization, not a committee set up by hollywood and wipo is beginning to understand it has wider interests to consider, than just what the copyright interests will say. so there's some potential for progress, but as long as the u.s. trade representative thinks that his job or her job is to represent one slice of the american economy to its maximum defense, i think we're going to continue to do harm internationally. >> you are now teaching at stanford university. and that's the center for producing the next generation for silicon valley. what do the students, or what do the recent graduates who are now in silicon valley, how do they feel about this and are they

trying to find ways to implement what you are suggesting? >> yeah. they were. i think there's a kind of fun unfair way to describe california, so pain a little unfair but fun is the final question. there's a fight between the forth and the south, right? so in the north, there are people who believe in a more balanced set of freedoms, right, that they think that freedom encourages creativity and innovation and they're actually pushing to defend it in. in the south, they brief that more property and -- believe that more property and more control is the way to produce innovation and that battle of north and south is vigorous in california right now, so graduates from stanford, some of them work in soil con valley, some go to work in hollywood. those who work in silicon valley are working hard to build an infrastructure to support this more balanced system so i think

companies like google and companies like yahoo! have been quite innovative in pushing the lines of fair use in ways that i think are progressive. but the grade waits that work in the south increasingly believe -- or at least until recently believe that more effective control is important. now i say until recently, because i'm actually optimistic about this cold war. i don't think congress is going to get it any time soon, but i do think that industry gets it. and increasingly, hollywood gets it. you know, increasingly, hollywood is deploying its assets in ways that encourage lots of people to participate in sharing that stuff and increasingly hollywood gets that if they're going to encourage respect for their reivity, they have to -- creativity, they have to respect others like the creative producers of this

stuff. but the market both in the north and south is encouraging it. i hope that my students or students from stanford help that progress. but i think more like i, it's going to be the business people. who push that progress, who get the importance of this. :

gunsight of georgia you are safe to dance jazz and even if your dog is. there's no criminal activity here but sony's and this guy, put the website say you it violated by circumventing our copy right protocol and then you take this down immediately and is pitting a person in the press and are suing people try to threaten a suit against trying to teach the dog to dance jazz but then inside sunni the business people said, wait a minute, why are we suing people who are making our products more valuable because of the dog continue to fix is more valuable dog, so why is it in our interest to punish people who are helping this for free? well, that's the recognition of a hybrid economy needs. why are we punishing people who are helping us? we should be encouraging them and that's essentially sunnis position was to be open and

encouraging and it is that dynamic that is encouraging to me as more people recognize that balance here actually can be profitable, that i.p. is not a religion, is a simple physical assets that you deploy to maximize value to the business not to the respect of the gods of i.p. who will move to a place where there's a more sensible system in the market and then we have to move to a place where it's more sensible to government. thanks very much. [applause] >> things very much for opening up a new way of looking at the nevada and want to remind you that his book is available to purchase. to thank you for coming. [inaudible conversations] >> lawrence lessig is the author of several books including "the future of ideas" and "free culture". is he is a law professor at stanford in and out of the university's center for internet and society. he's also a columnist for wired magazine and chairs the

creative, fearing for more information about lawrence lessig and to read his blog visit his web site. this summer booktv is asking, what are you reading clerks. >> susan weinberg, publisher of public affairs books, what's on your summer reading list? >> for the first book is a real change of pace because republish nonfiction and rita lot but i hope this summer i get to read the master, it is a book that i know the publisher and she gave me at half the issue gives me a copy of books and very often