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Lawrence Lessig: The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge

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    Lawrence Lessig: Thank you very much. It's extremely cool to be here.
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    It's just about as cool as when I spoke at Pixar.
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    I think of these two as being highlights of my career (check).
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    So, thank you very much for having me.
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    I have two small ideas I want to use as an introduction to an argument,
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    about the nature of access to scientific knowledge in the context of the internet,
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    and use that argument as a step towards a plea about what we should do.
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    So here is the first idea.
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    I want to call it the "White-effect".
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    And I name that after Justice Byron White, justice of the US Supreme Court,
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    appointed by John F. Kennedy - here he is in 1962
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    - famous before that as 'Whizzer' White on the Yale University football team
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    When he was appointed to the Supreme Court, he was a famous liberal,
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    renowned liberal, the only appointee that John Kennedy had to the Supreme Court.
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    But 'Whizzer' White grew old, and he is probably most famous for an infamous opinion,
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    which he penned on behalf of the Supreme Court, Bowers v. Hardwick,
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    an opinion where the Supreme Court upheld the Criminalization of Sodomy law.
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    Here is the passage: 'Against this background, to claim that a right to engage
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    in such conduct' - homosexual sodomy - 'is "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition"
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    or "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty" is, at best, facetious.'
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    Now, this is what I want to think of as the "White Effect".
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    To be a liberal or a progressive is always relative to a moment, and that moment changes,
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    and too many are liberal or progressive no more.
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    So, that's the "White effect". Here is the second idea.
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    The Harvard Gazette is a kind of propaganda publication of Harvard University,
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    it talks about all the happy things at Harvard.
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    So here's an article that it wrote, about an extraordinary macro-economist,
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    Gita Gopinath, who has just come to Harvard, received tenure last year
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    and is one of the most influential macroeconomists in the United States right now.
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    This article talks about her work and her research, and at the very end,
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    there is this puzzling passage, where it says:
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    'Still, the shelves in her new office are nearly bare, since, said Gopinath,
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    "Everything I need is on the Internet now." '
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    Right, that's the second idea. Here is the argument.
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    So, copyright is a regulation by the State intended to change
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    a regulation by the market. It's an exclusive right, a monopoly right,
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    a property right granted by the State, which is necessary
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    to solve an inevitable market failure.
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    Now, by saying that it's necessary to solve an inevitable market failure,
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    I'm marking myself as a pro-copyright scholar,
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    in the sense that I believe copyright is necessary, even in a digital age.
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    Especially in a digital age, copyright is necessary to achieve
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    certain incentives that otherwise would be lost.
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    But in the internet age, what we've seen as a fight about copyright,
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    about the scope of copyright, waged most consistently in the context
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    of the battle over artists' rights, in particular, in the context of music,
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    where massive 'sharing' - sharing which is technically illegal - has lead to a fight
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    fought by artists and especially by artists' representatives.
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    And we from the Free Culture movement, have challenged the people
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    who have been waging that fight.
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    And they defend copyright in the context of that fight.
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    But if we get above the din of this battle, the important thing to keep in mind
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    is that both sides in this fight acknowledge that copyright is essential
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    for certain creative work,
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    and we need to respect copyright for that creative work.
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    We, from the Free Culture movement, need to respect copyright for that work,
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    we need to recognize that there is a place for sensible copyright policy
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    to protect and encourage that work.
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    But, however - and here is the important distinction -
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    Not only artists rely upon copyright, copyright is also relied upon by publishers,
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    and publishers are a different animal.
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    We don't have to be as negative as John Milton was when he wrote publishers are
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    "Old patentees and monopolizers in the trade of books
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    - men who do no labor in an honest profession, to [them], learning is indebted."
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    We don't have to go quite that far to recognize why publishers are different,
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    that the economic problem for publishers is different
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    from the economic problems presented by creating.
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    So who is copyright for? The publishers or the artists?
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    Well, since the beginning of copyright in the Anglo-American tradition,
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    the Statute of Anne of 1710, there has been this argument about whether copyright
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    was intended for the publishers or the artists.
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    When the Statute of Anne was originally introduced, it gave a perpetual term of copyright,
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    which the publishers understood to be a protection for them.
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    It was then amended to give just a limited term for copyright.
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    Publishers were puzzled about that, because it wouldn't make sense to give a limited term
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    if it was the publisher that was to be protected.
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    In 1769, a court case in the context of Millar v. Taylor seemd to suggest that
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    despite the limitation of the Statute of Anne, copyright was for ever.
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    But in 1774, in a very famous case about this book, The Seasons, by James Thomson,
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    the House of Lords have held that copyright protected by the Status of Anne was limited,
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    holding for the first time that works passed into the public domain.
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    And for the first time in English history, works including Shakespeare
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    passed into the public domain. And in this moment, we can say Free Culture was born.
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    And it also clarified that copyright was not intended for the publisher.
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    Even if it benefited the publishers, it was a creative right
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    and author's right. Even if benefitting publishers, copyright was for authors.
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    So, I remark these obvious borders about the scope of copyright,
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    because we tend to forget them. We've been fighting a battle in the context of copyright
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    where copyright is essential, and we are spending too little attention
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    about a battle in a context where copyright is not essential.
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    And I mean by that, in the context of science, in the context that Gopinath was speaking of
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    when she talked about everything being available on the internet.
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    And the consequence of failing to pay attention to this second context
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    within which this battle is being waged is that there is a trouble here
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    that too few see.
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    So let's think about this claim that everything is on the internet now.
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    What does that mean?
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    Here is a particular example to evaluate what that means.
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    Much of my work, these days, is focusing on corruption
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    in the context of this institution, Congress.
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    So let's say that we wanted to study, you wanted to study with me,
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    corruption in this context. Go to Google Scholar and enter a search for campaign finance.
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    Here are the top articles that would be listed from that search.
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    So let's say you wanted to browse through these articles
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    and get a sense of campaign finance and how it might be related to corruption in Congress.
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    So here are the top 10 articles. This first one, a very famous one
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    by my former colleagues Pam Karlan and Sam Issacharof.
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    You would find, to get access to this article, you'd have to pay $29.95.
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    The second article, housed at JSTOR, you'd have to get through to get permission
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    from the Columbia Law Review - not quite clear how you would do that.
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    Third article, again, $29.95. The fourth article, protected by Questia,
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    we learn that you can get a 1-day free trial to all these Oxford University Press articles,
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    you'd only have to pay when that day is over 99 dollars
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    to continue for a year.
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    Here is the 4th article again, protected by JSTOR.
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    The 5th article, it's an economics article, so the price is right on the surface:
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    10 dollars to purchase access to this article.
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    Here's the 7th article, Columbia Law Review.
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    8th article, Columbia Law Review, 9th article, protected again by JSTOR,
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    10th article, $29.95. So, how accessible is this information to the general public?
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    Well, one of these you can get access to for free, at least one time only,
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    One of them you can pay $10 for. 3 of them, $29.95, and 5 of them, terms unknown,
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    protected by JSTOR.
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    So, when Gopinath says "Everything I need is on the internet",
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    what does she mean? What she means is if - and this is a big if -
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    you're a tenured professor in an elite university or we could say a professor,
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    or a student or professor in an elite university, or maybe
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    a student or professor at a US university, if you are a member of the knowledge elite,
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    then you have effectively free access to all of this information.
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    But if you are from the rest of the world? Not so much.
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    Now, the thing to recognize is we built this world,
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    we built this architecture for access that flows from the deployment of copyright,
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    but here, copyright to benefit publishers. Not to enable authors.
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    Not one of these authors gets money from copyright.
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    Not one of them wants the distribution of their articles limited.
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    Not one of them has a business model that turns upon restricting access to their work.
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    Not one of them should support this system.
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    As a knowledge policy for the creators of this knowledge, this is crazy.
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    And the craziness doesn't stop here.
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    So, my third child is this extraordinarily beautiful girl, Samantha Tess.
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    When she was born, the doctors were worried she had a condition
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    that would suggest jaundice. I had jaundice as a baby, so I didn't think it was serious,
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    and I was told very forcefully by her doctor, this is extroardinarily serious.
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    If this condition manifest in the dangerous condition, it would produce brain damage,
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    possibly death.
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    So, of course, we were terrified. I went home and I did what every academic did,
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    I pulled everything I could from the web to study about what jaundice was
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    and what the conditions were. Now, because I am a Harvard professor,
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    of course, I didn't have to pay to get access to this information, but I just kept the total.
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    To get access to these 20 articles that I wanted access to was $435,
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    for the ordinary human, not a Harvard professor. OK.
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    So I gathered these articles and set them aside, believing this problem
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    would not manifest itself in such a serious way.
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    But on her third day, she fell into a stupor, and we called the doctor,
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    and the doctor was panciked and he said we had to get to the hospital immediately.
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    So, at 3 o'clock in the morning, we trundled the baby up and raced to the hospital.
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    We were sitting in the waiting room, and I brought the articles with me,
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    because I wanted something to do, to distract me from the terror
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    that my child had this condition.
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    And I picked up the first of these articles, which is actually free,
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    published on the web for free, at the American Family Physician,
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    and I started reading about this condition.
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    And I got to this table, a table that was going to describe
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    when you should worry about whether the child would have too severe of this exposure.
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    I turned the page, and this is what I found:
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    "The rightsholder did not grant rights to reproduce this item in electronic media.
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    For the missing item, see the original print version of this publication."
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    And I had this moment of liberation from fear about my child,
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    because I turned to fear about our culture. I thought, this is outrageous!
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    The idea that we are regulating access down to the chart in an article
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    that was published for free to help, not doctors, but parents
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    understand what this condition was.
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    We are regulating access to parts of articles.
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    Now here and throughout our architecture for access,
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    we are building an infrastructure for this regulation.
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    Think of the Google Books project, which is perfecting control down to the sentence,
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    the ability to regulate access down to the sentence.
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    By the way, I alway forget to tell this: the kid is fine, she didn't have jaundice,
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    it is a complete non issue.
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    But the point is, we are archintecting access here, for what purpose?
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    To maximize revenue. And why? Revenue to the authors?
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    Revenues necessary to produce the incentive to create?
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    Is this a limitation that serves any of the real objectives of copyright? (14:00)
Title:
Lawrence Lessig: The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge
Description:

Lecture at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, 18 April 2011: A new talk about open access to academic or scientific information, with a bit of commentary about YouTube Copyright School. ;
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Video Language:
English
Team:
Captions Requested
Duration:
50:19

English subtitles

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