turow and richard posner talk about book related topics. this is about an hour and 15 minutes. >> hello, good evening, everybody. and david outer boro, president of the new library and i want to welcome all of you. thank you for joining us for the second in our new series of conversations at the newberry. the newberry has been offering educational programs to the public since the early 1890s. so we think of this new series as an integral part of the long and important tradition in

chicago. tonight's program is being audio recorded by chicago amplified, which is an initiative of chicago public radio. chicago amplified as a web based audio library of educational than and you can listen to a podcast of this event at the chicago amplified website, debut bec or/amplified. booktv is also recording the program and will post on our website to broadcast time when it is known. toward the end of the program this evening, there will be an opportunity for audience involvement. in order to make sure that everybody can hear audience comments or questions and to include what you have to say and the recording, we will bring a microphone to audience members who want to speak. what other forms of technology in mind, then let me ask you now to be sure that your cell phones

and other devices are turned off for silence. i want to thank our sponsors, newberry trustee sucre and her husband, mel, for generally -- generously supporting these events. as longtime cochair of one of our boat group's, suit appreciate fully the important conversation about ideas that she has played an important part in creating the series and taken about the kinds of conversations and conversationalist that we should host here. so, sue, thank you very much. our conversationalist tonight are extremely well-known members of the chicago and indeed the national intellectual culture and legal worlds. my introductions to them will be brief since i feel confident that all of you know something of them in their work.

scott turow has had a fascinating career mixing work as a prominent lawyer at the firm snr data method is known known today with writing and especially the writing of fiction. his novels have won much acclaim from reviewers and from his peers, symbolized by their seat at prestigious honors including a reddish silver dagger award. moreover they have reached an enormous audience, and millions of copies of them have sold. mr. turow's pro bono to the state of illinois among other places are notable, including his involvement with the hernandez case and with the re-examination of the death penalty here. he is currently serving his second term as president of the authors guild. most of you probably know about it, but in case you doubt it is an american organization that supports and provides a range of

pro bono advice to authors and has taken strong such matters as the google books project. i have to say one of the things i like most about scott is he is an ardent and knowledgeable baseball fan. another is he is a longtime friend of the newberry. i want to add that if you haven't yet read his 1977 book one of you urge you do so. chicago magazine has recently reminded us, fred schapiro at the yale law steel police richard poser is the most cited jurist of the 20th century and i presume now 21st century. there is good reason to come to this conclusion. first he has been a member of the second circuit of the united states court of go since 1981 and has written a vast body of legal opinions. second, during that time he's

published many, many books and articles and in recent years has become a much discussed blogger. third, taken as a group has publications explore what i think it's a remarkable range of intellectual interest. doing so with great subtlety. of course he is held to educate and train a large number of students at the university of chicago law school, where he has remained on the faculty since becoming a judge. among what i think are his most interesting books is his study of the decline of public intellectuals. and i might add, the observing introduction he wrote for a new addition of a largely forgotten classic, genes that james stephen's liberty, equality and fraternity. it is a good introduction i believe to judge prisoners approach to thinking about big issues that are the code, but more than the code. this evening mr. truro and judge

pozen are going to talk about books, authors, libraries and their speed in the digital age. obviously the issues involved are important to us here at the newberry and we think they should be important to everyone. let me provide a little context for the discussion that is going to ensue but according to recent seemingly contrasting comments by people who have connections with the newberry. one comes from robert h. jackson, a trustee of ours and a noted cleveland collector who introduced with these words and important conference at hard times of the country's most important biblical access i.d. to grow your club of new york. today, books space of four horsemen of the print media apocalypse, computer, video, the internet and the iphone.

history is changing books and it is something for us to worry about, unquote. another is what is and anthony grafton, recipient of the newberry award wrote this wonderful little book, kodak's increase this. sit in your local coffee shop in your lap top can tell you a lot, especially few realtors search terms at the alley. if you want deeper more local knowledge will still have to take the narrow path through the library doors and into the land of physical reading material. gentlemen, we are grateful to those of you for being here this evening and we look forward to your conversations. [applause] >> well, i promised david that i would start and this will be

basically sort of a few minutes of woolgathering on my part. as david mentioned, i am the president of the authors quote and they did it the first time in the early 1990s and the difference now is remarkable. i found yesterday afternoon and this morning and washing 10 making stops. as president of the authors guild and various senate and house chambers, talking with intellectual properties. stuff is finally in this morning in march meetings at the justice department, talking about antitrust issues affecting the book industry. all of them relating to the digital revolution.

and just to throw out some of the many bombs, the electronic book, which probably does not encounter universal favor in this audience, but you know, the e-book is unquestionably here to stay. and it is here to stay for a couple of reasons. one is portability. those of us who spend a lot of time on airplanes know that it's a lot easier to have the ipod that i used to write non-now they had to be carrying, you know, three bolt pure books with me. it's also here to stay because i think publishers have begun to realize that it dramatically reduces their cost structure.

ocean is often referred to as the 19th century as ms. dragged kicking and screaming into play. they are disposed to the new book and now they've realized you don't have printing costs. they don't have warehousing costs. they don't have shipping costs and most gloriously, the book business has always operated on a model that the publisher bears the risk of sale, meaning that you should books to a store. if they don't sail, to hook shifters should send that to the seller. so the e-book is seemingly here to stay here with that, it has brought many perils and opportunities among the concerns

of horrors book piracy is coming rampant. this is the congress tried to deal with this recently and the piece of ill-fated legislation that was known a online piracy act at the period to remember what the acronym is an internet community rosa and forward. the book piracy, like piracy of all kinds of intellectual property is a growing problem. it concerns me is president of the authors guild because everything is being pirated. it is not a special occurs for best-selling authors. but at the bottom of the food chain, our authors as their margins are nibbled into any further, there looks just won't be published. so that is one problem.

the e-book obviously has created the risk of enormous concentration in the book business. the e-book was not bill invented by the amazon, but they pioneered see how one point a couple of years ago they had 90% of the e-book market. they still have 60% of the e-book market and one worries about what would happen in a market that concentrated. so that is another can turn. the mere survival publishers is another question today. the book business has not been terribly profitable for quite some time, certainly since 9/11 and whether the so-called brick-and-mortar publishers will

survive with amazon has now gone into the publishing business, to. that is a separate issue from my own, my publishers have always added value, both in terms of the marketing hooks in the editing of. or perhaps another model is going to emerge. i am not particularly eager to be a notch for newer and business and hiring my own editors and my own marketing peep hole. not because they haven't been blessed to be in a position where that's feasible, but simply because i don't know how to do those names and i would rather spend my time writing than worrying about the marketing of my book. and then of course there is the question of special pertinence

here, which is whether libraries are going to survive. let me step back and say that the combination of discounting and now the e-book has made the survival of bookstores very much in doubt and especially in the non-occupies that space in the way that they have, it is going to be very hard for any book retailers to survive. and i can explain in more detail why the world developed that way but that has to do with the fact that amazon was when the candle came into being was willing to sell e-books, losing $5 every time he sold the e-book that among other things prevented bookstores from trying to get into the same business.

so bookstores we know our heart pressed. borders closed stores last years. independent stores have closed all over the country. and to whatever extent bookstores hire intellectual centers in our community, there is since has threatened some give of authors, bookstores generally speaking i were the site from the authors have emerged. .. are different and that is

because of the prospect of near universal access through the computer terminal in your home. and will libraries still exist in that environment? google, a few years ago, scanned the collection of seven major university libraries. and wanted to make the contents available for sampleling by potential readers. the author's guild sued them because, in our view, although google was only displaying snippets to each individual user, they were using the whole book and selling advertising in doing so. and so google claims it's a fai use. we think it isn't. the case was settled on what i

thought were generally reasonable terms but the justice department objected because so-called orphan works, which are books whose copyright ownership can no longer be determined, were covered by the settlement and google would have ended up with a de facto monopoly over true ofan works and the judge disapproved the settlement just like the justice department. so that is being litigated in a world where it's clearly a good thing for a ten-year-old who can speak english in china to be able to have access to the full contents of the university of michigan library. but what happens to an institution like this one? in that world?

so, with just having fired a few missiles, i will turn this over to judge posner. when david and i first talk about the program, he said, who would be an interesting companion in conversation? i immediately thought of judge posner. he is one of the most far-thinking public intellectuals that we have, and i knew that somebody who is published as many books as he has, he undoubtedly had contemplated or digital future. >> well, my perspective is quite different. i'm not a best-selling author. my books are actually -- i guess they're all academic, and they don't sell many copies and don't generate much income. so, whenever you're dealing with the issues of -- whether it's

literature or any kind of writing, there are two basic interests you have to consider. one is the incentive of people to create the art and so on, and that is what scott stresses, what the authors guild obviously is interested in. but the other is the distribution of these works, and the access of people to these works. and it's distribution and access that has been revolutionized by computers, and in that revolution, which i think is tremendously good thing -- but it does have a negative implication for some creativity. i think it's a scandal, myself,

that google has been frustrated in its efforts to digitize all works ever published. they ought to ought to all be dd and ought to be available to anybody in the world. otherwise you're just withholding from people, their access to the great body of human thought. and digital distribution is simply immensely more efficient than libraries or book stores. i'm not talking about research libraries like the newberry library because they diversify into all sorts of activities that are not simply storage and lending or providing access to books.

so they have a future. diminished to the extent that they are providing a storage and access service, when all works of art, literature, are digitized, at as they will be eventually, fewer scholars will come to research libraries to do research. they'll research on their laptop, and it's just such an immensely efficient mode of distribution, and it really should be universalized. it's instantaneous. i happen to be a tremendous admirer also, not only of google but of amazon, which is an unbelievable resource. it is just so immensely easy to obtain books through amazon. now, where the book stores have

one -- well, actually, some book stores have actually benefited from amazon because amazon has provided a market to small book stores that specialize in out of printworks. so i did a lot of out of print books from the small booksellers through amazon, and amazon not only provides access to these people but they also -- i don't know about your experience but the experience with amazon is terrific. you've get books sent to you by some absolutely unknown tiny book seller, who knows where, and yet it's prompt and whatever they represent the condition of the book, that's how it comes. so, some booksellers are

benefiting from amazon, but the only real advantage that a conventional book store has over amazon is browsing. and -- but that's going to change because amazon already -- it provides recommendations, because they're looking at what you're ordering, and then they're using that to make recommendations. that's a artificial intelligence service that is not highly developed. it's unsophisticated and doesn't work well, but that's just a matter of time before advances in computer science will provide much more intelligent advice from amazon on what you should be considering, and that becomes helpful to browsing so i don't think the book stores -- apart

from the esoteric stuff, i don't think they have a future. as for libraries, the standard libraries, they're just dying. right? because of all the ways to get access to a book, going into a library and looking in a card catalogue and going to the shelving, that's hopeless, really. [laughter] >> if you want to do research, you do it digitally. you get access to every -- should be able to get access to every book in the world. and i just don't see -- i don't see that as a -- you know, the students, the college university students don't go to university libraries anymore. they go to lie barb at

university of chicago, you don't see any people there if you walk into the stacks, you'll see some kids, you know, drinking coffee or whatever, socializing. it's just not efficient research. and as i say, as far as storage is concerned, you can put every book that's ever been published, the full text, add in all the works of art and music, and probably put it on a chip this large, and then the whole world would have access to it. and i don't think these libraries can compete, and there has been a significant reduction in the use of university libraries in particular. now, books -- sales of hard

books compared to ebooks -- the sale of hard books, although it hasn't increased, it's held its own. that's not the problem. i much prefer reading books that are in the old fashioned printed books. if i'm doing research, working on a judicial opinion, it's easier to look on google. if i'm going to read the entire book i'd rather have the he book. but if you want the hard books, it's hard to beat amazon as a mode of distribution of those books compared to the book stores. so, what are the effects on the authors, on the creators? well, it's probably negative because, as scott says, there's a lot of piracy.

people like me don't care because it's not a significant part of my income. so -- and of course, authors also want a lot of people to read their books. so, piracy is actually a two-edged sword because, you know, with piracy, more people read your books, maybe the pirates will become interested and maybe they'll buy your books. microsoft complains bitterly about piracy in the third world. people stealing their operating system. windows. i think they're kidding, because what happens with microsoft is that these people -- yeah, maybe

they stole the operating system, hacked the operating system, but now when they're microsoft users, there are all sorts of other microsoft products they decide they want. so they become microsoft and not apple people, which helps microsoft. so, then the question is -- now, there are other ways which historically and no reason why it can't be true -- in which authors are compensated. not true that royalties are the -- used to be pattronnage, not royalties. royalties are relatively recent developments. as long as there's a demand for new works, literature and art and so on, there are lots of different ways of compensation, and offsetting the effects of piracy, but scott is right. there's an impact. it apparently hits the least established authors. the most is a tradeoff between

the great access that computerization gives to the consumer of intellectual products and the disincentive for the create testify -- creative intellectual product if they're not fully compensated. >> well, first, i have to defend the author's guild for suing google, and this is just google digitized the contents of these libraries, not as an act of altruism. they did it as a commercial venture, and they're selling advertising everytime you go and look at the page. and frankly, google and the authors and the publishers, have all agreed on a way to divide that income. in the settlement, and unfortunately the court, for its

own reason, didn't approve along with the justice department. so, the settlement perished. but it's just -- it's a fight over who is going to make the money. and a lot of this revolves -- a lot of all of this issues revolve around the concept of copyright, which has always existed as long as the republic, the constitution, provides for protection for inventors and creators, and copyright is a limited monopoly which is granted to the author or, in the case of pat -- patents the inventors, and it's supposed to be the incentive the creator has, that they can exclude people from using their intellectual property, their work, for a period of time.

then eventually things pass into public domain. a lot of this has become the creature of large corporations. so that the period of copyright hat been extended, most recently to the activism of the walt disney company which didn't want mickey mouse passing into public dough main and there is no doubt that copyright and the need to enhance the public body of knowledge are to some extent in conflict. and the way that conflict has been resolved under our existing model, is through the existence of libraries, where you have free access to the intellectual properties created by authors. software manufacturers, with the

way, many of them don't like this so-called first sale doctrine or the library lending right that existness the copyright laws. they don't want any exception. but one of the significant, i think, important -- significance of libraries and the importance is the fact that access to books is free. you walk into a library, and this world of knowledge is available to you for nothing. and so one of the parts of the google settlement provided that there would be access to the google collection, call it what you will -- in every public library. there would be a terminal providing for free access, to the contents of these seven libraries. so, when we exalt amazon, we also have to ask the question

about, what happens to the young, the poor, and the elderly, who have been traditional users of our public libraries and probably even to some extent this institution. and it would be unfortunate if the net effect of this attempt to broaden access to the world of knowledge in point ends up excluding certain people. this has been a threat in the digital world from the beginning , and it's still with us and the problem is just transferred to the world of books. but it is a significant concern. the libraries are trying to make arrangements with publishers now

for -- to download, make the library sites where ebooks can be downloaded. many public libraries around the country are doing that. some of them want to do it without limitation. and literally supplant amazon by using the library lending rights to make ebooks available for free through their portal. in which case one copy of every book will be sold because the library will make it available to everybody in the world to authors and publishers are up in arms about that idea. but i don't know if the judge wants to respond to any of that or just answer the broader question, which is, what do you think the future of copyright is? >> well, i'm not a fan of

copyright, actually. >> can you explain that? >> i do certainly agree with you that google is not motivated by altruism. this is a jungle, right? whether it's philosophers or booksellers. everyone is struggling for financial advantage. so i think the first copy right law in the english speaking world, is about 1710 or 1709. isn't that the first english copyright law? so you have homer, the greek tragedies and dante and shakespeare and milton and so on there are a lot of other

incentives for writing besides royalties based on your ability to forbid other people to copy your stuff. there is -- there's been a lot of people out of compulsion, trying to make money, they have to eat, but that's not why they're writing. they're not trying to get -- they'd love to get rich but they write because they have a great drive to do it. or they have patrons, or they have nowdays -- we actually have a patronage system because a lot of writers are employed by universities. right? so, their employment is -- they're actually compensated for writing. they have a salary and it covers both their teaching and their writing. so, patronage remains an important mode of compensating authors that isn't part of copyright.

>> also, especially now, there are all sorts of ways in which successful writers make money other than from the sale of their books. they're invited to give lectures. they exploit other media. movies, tv series, so on. so, the problem with copyright is, it's a tremendous -- they're tremendous blockages of access. the fair-use doctrine that scott mentioned, this has been scandalously contracted by

publishers. you get a book, and on the copyright page it will say, no part of this book can be reproduced without permission of the publisher. that happens to be legally false, and the patron which i said that publishers and authors and so on, who misrepresent copyright rights, the rights they have, by in effect denying fair use doctrines, they ought to lose their copyright. so the fair-use doctrine says that you're permitted, without getting the permission of the author, without compensating the author, you're permitted to quote parts of the work or use

it in other ways, provided that there's a justification for this appropriation without seeking permission, and of course, anytime someone quotes in a book or newspaper article or what have you from a copyrighted work, he is using a copyrighted work, reproducing a copyrighted work, without authorization, without seeking permission, and yet it's lawful. i think people should be free to republish an academy work, other than maybe -- with the exception of textbooks -- academic articles without getting the permission of the author. what's the point? i get all these e-mails,

pathetic e-mails, someone says i want to make ten copies of your article for my seminar. and they have to have my permission. i say, of course you have my permission. there's no fee. so, -- you know, the -- all sorts of movement -- when you make a movie, you run into a fair-use mine field because you might accidentally photograph in your movie some painting on a wall. there's been a case like that. exterior wall, a painting. happened to be captured in the frame of a picture and they were

sued for copyright infringement. soright -- copy rate -- copyright is a terrible briar patch for authors, and they like to be able to use published stuff. where would shakespeare be in a copyright ear ya. he was a shameless plagarist. in plutox life is mark anthony or julius cesar, that's a great

description of cleopatra on her barge. shakes -- shakespeare rewrote it and it's one of the great scenes of anthony and cleo -- cleopatra. and if you did that today -- the copy right is stretched out. 75 years now -- now you have to get plutars permission. you improved it. put in a blank verse, changed some things, basically used so much overlap that, i'm sorry, got to get his permission. so plutar says you're a very successful playwright. i'm just an historian, an on greek historian. so i'm going to have to charge

you for this. so it's a tremendous bonanza for lawyers. so i'm skeptical, and i particularly emphasize the fact that all creative writing, all academic writing, all built on prior stuff, and the more you know about literature, the more you know about an academic field, the more you realize that the famous people, successful people, they borrowed tremendously from their predecessors. and the more difficult you make it through copy to appropriate to build on, the more you actually retard creativity at the same time that you are increasing the financial rewards to the new creator. >> so let's move the

conversation about, there's a lot in there i would love to quarrel with, of course. and i -- whatever the virtue of judge posner's observations about copyright, the reality is that there are now massive industries directed on its existence, and the chances of congress throwing away copyright to the detriment of all of these industries that are -- that are dependent on intellectual property, is, i think, not realistic. i think copyright patentses are here. certainly for the foreseeable future. but you told -- when we were talking about what we might discuss, you were talking to david and me about the way your books are edited now, which -- >> oh,ey. >> i felt was really interesting, and another sort of side of the digital world.

>> well, it's interesting. all companies now -- this is just as efficient -- engage in extensive outsourcing and now the harvard university press does not edit the books its publishes. its outsources them -- not all but it's done -- a couple of mine, several of mind, and i questioned it with my latest book. ...

and because, you know, if they come to me whose entire business is editorial work, they're really good at it and they're very last. and you know, it is much, much, much easier to do rewriting and editing digitally done by hand. i mean, it's extraordinary. i do a lot of writing and a lot of rewriting of my staff. and it's just so much easier and so effortless to rewrite on a

computer, words by hand, you have to have it retyped constantly. so digitization has somewhat not just for access, but also for authors and is greatly simplified research. it's an extraordinary room for judges. they throw at us cases that we don't want a thing about it all. and their lawyers so they are very cagey. they tell us just what they think we need to know to vote for them and it's often very little. so i go online. and i look at the product and the company is and i find a lot of stuff, a lot of things that i could never find out in the

conventional way. so these tremendous damages, which i've been stressing and i know there's a downside that scott is very concerned with and i have nothing against the authors guild fighting for it in the interest of its authors. although i do emphasize the fact that too much copyright hurts the authors. you know, you think of all the derivative works. so if you see that as a careless, i think it's called careless, but it's been busy but to take off on -- u.s. so that's a very good movie. so if i'm our still in

copyright, the clueless would be a derivative word in the copyright holder, jane austen errors would be able to block clueless. so someone who would want to do clueless would have to go and deal with jane austen's descendents or would be difficult at least that the prisoners idea for clueless can't tell too much of that to jane austen as they decide to make a course. so it's very awkward to have derivative words of the original, but the authors, which is the evident. that's an example of the kind of copyright law it creates for new

creative work. >> my only response to that point and again i am not in favor of limited expansion of copyright, but i kind of instinctively think that there is having a limited period, which does incentivizes people who want to write outside a university setting and frankly if everybody is writing his side the university setting, it's not unusual to be able, for example, to tell a short story that came out of the university of iowa's workshop because there's certain hallmarks of it. and you know, there's great value in having created were coming from all segments of the society. and i do think that the

copyright by now does provide the incentive that it's supposed to. i think if there were no copyrights they would be a whole lot of people who would write anyway. but there was not have secretly write the second and the third and fourth book when they discovered that there was no reward and peered this is an argument back and forth and where you should strike the balance. but i have to say that coming in now, if clueless were to be written during jane austen's lifetime, i think that is much different. si production of invisible man. a performance of invisible man down at the court theatre in height part. and i can criticize the production, and that it had been

many years that the palestinian state resisted having invisible man traumatized. and i kind of feel that within a limited period of time that to be ralph ellison's right to say that i only want people to encounter my characters, my story in the way i originally envisioned and certainly judge poser is right that most authors are very happy to have their works traumatized and filmed and it broadens the audience. it's a good payday. although it point out that if copyright didn't exist, there would not be any reward for authors and not system. but i do think there is the french concept, the cotton on

the concept that an author has a certain interest in the integrity of his or her own work. he has an intuitive appeal coming in is embraced in the concept of copywriting. but the bottom line though is we are entering a much, much different world and we said in a physical edifice that existed to create access to books i don't think we've thought of yet a good answer for segments of the society and there's infinite to create an answer. >> utah about a lifetime jane

austen. the copyright term is now 75 years from the authors. so the author knighted died at the age of 75 and might have written his best work when he was 20, 55 years earlier. 55 plus 75 is 130. that is a limited term. >> it wasn't the authors guild out there asking to have it expended. >> but asking him to be compressed five years. why do we have 75 years? hurdling mickey mouse. mickey mouse. but partly it is funny though no because tony bethel skied into a tree and killed themselves

whereby he came and national hero and the famous leaside -- yet famously said that copyrights would be forever in soto's widow went to congress and our copyrights to be forever if you want forever, hambo 75 years. so between the murdered sonny bono and mickey mouse, we have this ridiculous turn. i mean it is ridiculous because very often suppose we wanted to reproduce, republish something that had been written a century ago and was still copyrighted as the author had died recently. if it isn't secure work, you might find it impossible to find out who owns the copyright.

then what do you do? an orphan copy of the north and copy. so when i started off as a jab and someone asked me to perform marriage ceremonies, and went to one of the oldest judges and said what is the merit tyranny? they said you have to meet these demerits earned money they gave me. this is 30 years ago. over the years when i perform a marriage ceremony, i give these to the couple and say, rewrite it, whatever you want with it. and they do and i keep copies. i have a tremendous collection of marriage ceremony which i don't have real interest in publishing, but i could see the service in publishing them so people can have ideas to what to put in their marriage ceremony. but of course i couldn't do that

because i don't know whether this old guy who died many years ago got them. for all i know they are copyrighted and then if anyone tried to publish them, some descendent would pop the say you've infringed the copyright. the copyright poses a lot of trouble and i don't think it really pays. >> i think we will now turn to the face of this program, where the audience has a chance to ask questions of our conversationalists or make comments. they are going to be people with microphones, so they will bring you a microphone and then you can say what you want to say.

>> well, we have an assertive u.s. oriented here. back in the 1980s i worked for chicago baseball at the national debt that a lot of business early on with china. so being nice people, they loved to have a chinese woman, to chicago to learn how to set up an intellectual property department in china. and northwestern participated. it was good. she went home, told them all about it. and the chinese officials said, why would anyone want to do that? and i think that is the way a lot of non-us countries that are emerging feel about this. so, let's take it out of the realm of just the u.s., western europe and talk about intellectual property worldwide.

>> while it's certainly the case that very many in the developing world who regard patent and copyright law as a western conspiracy to hold down the developing nations and there are many, you know, the chinese serafina copyright and patent pirates and the number of american business people who can tell you stories about going over to china and take advantage of the low labor cost and with their tool and die company patented tooling dies and find somehow there is a state owned factory that opens two or three years later write down the road, using miraculously the same tool

and die. you know, this is part of our landscape. and as i said, the chinese are not regarded as unduly deferential to intellectual property. i suppose when they start creating a lot of it, and then their feelings will change. and then you get into issues, the most celebrated examples are with drugs and, you know, it medications and western africa, or because there is a patent there is a price and these are impoverished nations and can impede afford to pay for it. the point of view pretty understandable to me is about to be available anyway. it's a life-saving drug.

we're not talking simply about expanding the world of knowledge, but preserving life. so yeah, there is significant disregard for the american intellectual property system in the developing world. >> the general problem is that the country as a consumer of intellectual property rather than a producer, it has no real incentive to enforce intellectual property because the only beneficiaries with either foreigners who were supplying this intellectual property. i think it works out fine though and the long run because they need access to or intellectual property to become his. as they become good, scott mentioned the low wage rates because they become invested become wealthier countries.

they wage rates rise and we benefit from trade with these countries. we are actually financed by china, right? china owns a great deal of the american public debt, along with japan and other countries, right-click so we benefit a lot from china's growing wealth. we have potential antagonisms but china over taiwan and islands in the south china city of the want. so we don't have a fully comfortable relationship with china, but it's certainly understandable why this country initially irs consumers of the electorate property do not support intellectual property rights. and this is true, as scott mentions that patents even more so than with copyrights. my experience with china come

intellectual property i have been told, you know, my books have been translated into chinese, a really big market in china and once the gene of aging law school came through chicago and have lunch anyhow the whole satchel full of translations of my books into chinese man with the grilling ace books. and i was too polite to say i never actually had a penny of my own from china with these translations. i haven't, but i am. so it is -- of course we want american idea is to penetrate in china. so the fact that they are translating our books without paying royalties may be in the national interest.

>> and a recent issue of "the new yorker" magazine paris of long issue that rid of fiction novel and got a book contract and was discovered fairly quickly that he had plagiarized almost the entire book, but interestingly for many, many source is, not just from one place. and in this article, the authors stated that plagiarism is not against the law. so is there a difference between plagiarism and copyright violation? >> yeah, plagiarism as whether it not as copyrighted material, it still plagiarized if you don't disclose. if you say i can't be -- it is the same essay by burgos, don

quixote. if you say that you are -- suppose i said, you know, i want to be a success. i want to be a popular success? cockerill, so i'm just going to copy the novel and sell it under my name. but i acknowledge it is all copied from him except for the title page, which has my name on it. so i would be a copyright infringer, but i wouldn't be a plagiarist because i wasn't feeling anything. on the other hand if i copy a work that is out of copyright, but i don't acknowledge the copy then i'm a plagiarist. it's not illegal to be a plagiarist. it is strongly disapproved in our concert. i didn't used to be. it used to be that the concept of creativity in the

renaissance, and shakespeare's england was that you were free to copy anything without acknowledgment, but you had to add something. you had to improve it. if you did that, then that was fine and you wouldn't be accused. because that wouldn't be a secret that shakespeare was taking the plots and plot details and so on from a previous author. but now we have this notion, sort of a romantic 19th century notion that the only creativity is originality and taken an existing work and improving it decisively is not creative. so if you don't acknowledge it, you work it be of a sand, which gets you fired and someone. so i wrote a little pic on plagiarism and there was a

harvard student. i forgotten the name now. it is an indian name, who had written a check with model and it was discovered -- she had a $500,000 movie doi kink. and you know, it looks like tremendous success. it turned out she had plagiarized part of her novel from another well known chick little author. so she was disgraced and she lost her $500,000 contract and so on. well, i read her book and i put particular attention to the passages that have been plagiarized. it turned out she didn't take the whole book or anything like that. she taken another passages.

what turned out as every past as she took had revised and they were better. so she had improved the original. now maybe because she taken status from the predecessor, she should be forced to pay a fearsome thing. if she had gone to this person and that, i'd like your vote, i'd like to take some stuff out of it, i don't think your book is very well-written however, but when i take your stuff and going to revise it. is this okay? this does not work. so if you allow this unauthorized copy with improvement, you lose some genuine creative work, but not the sort that we regard this proper in our culture.

>> comment by the question. i would like to circle back around to something you were talking about very early, just about access. i am a librarian and i work in a law firm, so i have access as do most of the people who are here. but i am an intentional mandate on the weekends. i do not have a computer at home and i choose not to. i have the option to choose not to, but they're any number of people in this culture and increasingly more of them who do not have that option. so when i go to the library on the weekends, i get to see what it is like for people who don't have access. e-books are not an option for them. how do you respond to people who don't have access? >> people who don't have access to the internet gaming? >> who don't have the money to buy the books. >> well, you don't need money --

i don't know why they should be a prize to accessing a book on the internet. [inaudible] >> how much a month? how much a month is internet access? computers now are very good and i don't think internet access, so were talking about a few hundred dollars. obviously there are people who don't have that money. if you want to subsidize for poor people, fine with me. i don't have any objection to

that. intrinsically the cost of electronic distribution and access are very low. they want to lure more of the subsidy for people who can afford it, fine with me. >> i alluded to this before, but this really is the function that the library has always played in our society and i do believe in free access to knowledge and i think it is important that there be a portal and the society for those who either can't afford to or have some scruples against it

. that place has been the library. and while i agree with judge post learned that libraries been rendered anachronistic by a lot of technological developments, i worry very much about the problem that you are talking about, which is, it shouldn't be the case that the world of knowledge is close for those without resources. >> i think we are going to leave it there. i would like to express on behalf of a new bury my thanks to the conversationalist this evening. mr. turow and judge posner. i want to thank you all of you for being part of this conversation tonight. i will just end by saying i wish we had some won't disney manuscripts at the newberry library and i'm going to check into that tomorrow. thank you all. we will see you back here the next time.

[applause] >> the morality of capitalism is the name of the book. the subtitle, "the mortality of capitalism: what your professors won't tell you" it is put out by students for liberty and meg and roberts is the communications or for that group. megan roberts, what won't our professors tell us click >> well, the "the morality of capitalism" book project if there was an expansion of our project we do every year. last year we published a logic works also with the subtitle, which are professors won't tell you and this year we did the morality of capitalism project and gave over an hundred thousand copies away to student groups out of the country to distribute on college campuses. the morality of capitalism is more focused on the idea of

capitalism as a moral argument, not just an economic one. so it is collected essays from writers all over the world, sort of with the viewpoint of capitalism. >> and that includes john mackey. who is john mackey? >> john mackey is the founder of whole foods. >> what is he right about quite >> he writes about capitalism as a moral argument that we have the moral high ground as capitalists. we are saying to people they have the freedom to decide how to live their lives. were not going to take it back to them and it's a very moral argument. >> what is students for liberty click >> students for liberty as five o. one c. three run for students by students of the network of support and resources for student groups over the world with leaders in europe, africa, oceana and all across the united states that are promoting ideas of liberty and college campuses. >> when was it sounded, where? >> it was founded in 2008 by a group of young interns