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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 (6:53)
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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