OPINION: LAWRENCE LESSIG The Limits of Copyright continued

RELATED CONTENT • Companies (3) • Articles (9) • Column Archives (3) • Topics (1) Printer-friendly version Email to a friend Write the author: • Lawrence Lessig The framers never envisioned giving copyright holders perfect control over the use of their writings; nor did they imagine that the limited monopoly they established would effectively run forever. They imagined a limited right that would create an incentive for authors to produce, and that "after a short interval," as Justice Joseph Story put it, what was produced would pass to the "full possession and enjoyment" of the public "without restraint." They imagined all this, it turns out, for very good reason. As economists have confirmed, it is not the case that every increase in intellectual property protection always will increase innovation. Intellectual property is both an input and an output in the information economy. Raising the costs of inputs can dampen more than incent innovation. What is needed with intellectual property is balance, not extremes. Not "overly strong" intellectual property protection, but appropriately strong intellectual property protection. Balance is not found by red-baiting. Those who question the scope of copyright law, those who doubt the wisdom of a world where use is perfectly controlled, those who remind our politicians of the framers' original balance, those who insist on balance - those people are not pirates. No doubt pirates should walk the plank; no doubt theft should be stopped; no doubt the Internet increases the risk of theft quite dramatically. But to question this radical increase in control over the ordinary use of copyrighted material by ordinary individuals is not to question a resolve against pirates. Everyone is entitled to his or her own (corporate) view. Adobe is entitled to press "overly strong" intellectual property protection if it pays. But the "false trade-off" is the one Warnock presents: between pirates and him. The true trade-off is between balance and him. The choice is between the balance that our framers, and our tradition, firmly recognized, and the recent race to increase government regulation of innovation through copyright. You are right, Mr. Warnock, to look to the Constitution to understand the nature of intellectual property. I suggest you do so again. Right there, in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, is a power granted to Congress - to secure "exclusive Rights" for "limited times" "to promote Progress." A balance, in other words, between intellectual property and an intellectual commons, to the end of progress. The text is available on my Web site, Mr. Warnock. In a PDF file. Lawrence Lessig is a professor at Harvard Law School and a fellow at Berlin's Wissenchaftskolleg. His Web site is http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/lessig.html. <PREV | Page 1 | Page 2

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