Robert Lemos

This will be a bit of departure for my normal all-security-all-the-time (though, not too far). Lawrence Lessing, founder of the Center for Internet and Society and a professor of law at Stanford University, gave the opening keynote at LinuxWorld on Tuesday, and frankly, the presentation was one of the better ones that I’ve seen in terms of clarity, content and the use of multimedia.

I did a news brief over at SecurityFocus on the main gist of the talk, but I had a few other observations that I thought might interest readers.

First off, Lessig was talking very much in the interest of the Creative Commons, an organization that he founded. The project aims to be a framework for content creators to license their works in such a way as to balance their rights against the rights of consumers and other creators to use the artistic works in unintended ways. Basically, Lessig has created a way for writers, musicians, movie makers, and others to voluntarily reserve only some rights to content.

That’s old news. The talk was interesting because he put all of his Creative Commons work in context. He used an information technology stack consisting–from the bottom up–of the hardware, the logical layer (the operating system), the applications and the content. Because of the success of Linux and the Free Software Foundation, the open-source software model poses enough of a viable choice for developers and users that it has forced the proprietary vendors, such as Microsoft, to compete for developers as a resource, he said. An example of this is the shared source initiatives that Microsoft has pursued.

The Creative Commons attempts to do the same thing for the content level. The proprietary model is that the first group to market gets a monopoly on a copyright and blocks others from any sort of use of that content, unless it is expressly allowed. The Creative Commons model reserves only certain rights–such as commercial uses–for the authors but allows anyone else to use the content for innovation.

Just as the open-source movement needed both developers and users on board, the Creative Commons movement needs both content creators and their audience. The project has grown rapidly, Lessig told attendees, jumping to more than 45 million links back to the Creative Commons license (a rough measure of the amount of content being put under the license).

The Stanford professor argued that the using digital rights management on all content makes creative culture into discrete goods that cannot be built upon, a world he referred to as a Read-Only world. In response to a question after his talk, Lessig pointed to jazz as a good example of a body of work that borrows on prior creators to build new content–a body of work that could not exist in today’s regulated environment. He called that model the Read-Write world.

Yet, while he obviously did not approve of the proprietary model, Lessig did not argue that the goal is to defeat the current copyright scheme. Instead, he argued that opening up content to be used by others as a raw material actually is more valuable than the proprietary “all rights reserved” model and, if given a chance, will prove to be a better business model.

Also note that digital rights management, as it exists today, not fit into the Creative Commons model because its overly restrictive. The technology typically defaults to disallow any use, the opposite of the historic model, which tended to allow any use. As many have argued, DRM and its policy twin–the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)–have proven to be better anticompetitive tools than machines for delivering just profits to content creators.