The Essence of Balance

This week, I came across a number of interesting videos and books that deal with so-called intellectual property, copyright issues, digital media, the free culture movement, Creative Commons licensing, and other related matters.

The first of which is a film called Good Copy, Bad Copy, which was released in 2007. It focuses largely on the creation of new music through sampling, the entertainment industry's opposition to file-sharing, and in a subtle way, the economics that underlie copyright issues. Perhaps most interesting to my mind was the segment that covers the Motion Picture Association of America's influence on Swedish authorities shutting down The Pirate Bay in May/June 2006. Since the Pirate Bay is in Swedish territory, and thus does not fall under US jurisdiction, the Pirate Bay isn't restricted by the copyright standards found in the US, and so no one could be detained nor could the state prohibit the Pirate Bay's continuation. Check out the film:

Next is a recently published book by James Boyle entitled The Public Domain. It's available as a pdf for free download. You can also freely read it online in html at Yale University Press. As one would expect from a book, The Public Domain goes into greater depth than Good Copy, Bad Copy concerning fair use and intellectual property issues. However, it is also broader in scope, as it addresses such things as invasive techniques to control what we are allowed to do with, what we are capable of doing with, and how we actually use media and software. Thus he carries on an extended discussion of such things as DRM, and proprietary vs. free and open source software. His message is a simple one: the public domain is worth preserving. Well, duh. Shouldn't that be a no-brainer? Unfortunately, for some people it isn't.

I also came across a recent interview with Lawrence Lessig on Charlie Rose, as well as a presentation Lessig gave at a conference hosted by Google in 2006. In the Charlie Rose interview, Lessig discusses his relationship with Barack Obama and how he has known Obama since the beginning of Obama's career as a law professor. He also discusses the influence of money in politics and how we need to work toward more open governance, his motivation for the establishment of Change Congress.

The only unique things I found about Lessig's Google presentation is that he compares Creative Commons licenses with the GNU General Public License, and that, during the Q & A period, he addresses some deeper philosophical questions about intellectual property vs. fair use. Beyond that, the rest is really just an extended version of a talk he gave at TED in 2007. So if you don't have an hour and fifteen to spare, check that out instead.

Finally, I read a long essay (or short book - whichever you prefer to call it, I guess) by Douglas Rushkoff entitled Open Source Democracy. It was published in 2003 by DEMOS and, like The Public Domain, is available for free download. Rushkoff's thesis is that political communities have been based largely on a top-down, proprietary model, in which power and decision-making is vested in a centralized group. By contrast, free and open source communities exhibit an emergent, bottom-up, and participatory model, in which power and decision-making is largely decentralized and vested in each member of the community. As such, free and open source communities provide an example of an alternative model for politics and governance. Check out p. 59-60, where Rushkoff draws a parallel between free and open source models and the economics of E.F. Schumacher.

Rushkoff's book is good insofar as it takes a first step towards addressing how free and open source models might be suggestive for new forms of government and politics. However, I found his argumentation a bit too loose at times. In the coming weeks I hope to post a blog that makes a stronger connection between free culture, open source, etc. and democracy. At any rate, Open Source Democracy is worth the hour and a half or so it takes to read.