User talk:Sj/Lessig
Add topicNotes and transcript from interview with Lawrence Lessig: 22:45-23:10 UTC, Dec 6 2004
Reflections[edit]
Lessig spoke quickly, often coming back in a pause to give a more thorough answer. He tempered his moments of passion with a steady reserve. I was nervous at first because of time pressure, but warmed to him. Listening to the interview while polishing the transcript, I realize two things: 1) I rushed past a point he clearly cared about and didn't get out: how there are places in Wikipedia "a half step from" being a canonical model for how a freer culture would make use of novel flexible copyright options; and 2) he felt defensive about Creative Commons when I was simply asking him his opinions about how modern culture was changing... perhaps I should have worded those questions more carefully. The former is worth its own separate article in the future.
Extra interview content[edit]
LL: ... I think the Wikimedia Foundation needs to think, "What are the functional objective that we have? Let's get legal code that supplies those functional objectives," the same way you say, what are the functional objectives of my servers? and get servers that supply exactly that.
[On how to reduce risks of long-term reuse trouble] LL: ... I think the solution to this problem will be found if the participants begin to treat the legal layer to this problem in the way users treat the operating system layer of a computer: you know the functionality you want, you the user. You want the functionality of facilitating this collaborative project, in a way that can be relied upon going forward. So you specify the functionality, and you really shouldn't worry too much if the functionality is implemented in C++ or in Java. That's a technical questions.
And there are those technical questions that the layers should be addressing: should we draft this license according to /this/ convention, or should we do this license in English vs Brazilian... Those technical questions need to be addressed by people who understand the technical capacities of the system. But the technical capacities are subservient to the functional objective.
[re: free culture, reuse] The most exciting thing about free culture will be the way in which, when we educate a generation using digital tools to manipulate content, we're going to have extraordinarily creative, interesting remixes of culture out there.
About CC[edit]
WQ: You say Creative Commons operates by demand and not ideology, but isn't one of its goals to help people bring about certain changes in culture?
LL: I certainly agree, that's our objective. But what I mean is, the particular forms of licenses that we're providing are more diverse than for example the Free Software Foundation's. Richard Stallman's not going to agree to a non-free license. And that's because he has a strong view of the importance of maintaining a pure free-license ecology in the context of software. We don't have that ideology in the context of culture.
[O]ur methodology is not ideology... in the free culture space, our particular licenses are driven by what people say they need, not by a set of precepts which we came to the project with.
So for example the sampling license was produced because people like Negativland said to us, 'We want a derivatives-only license. We don't want to give away the rights to make copies of our content, but we're happy to give away the rights to make derivatives of our content. We want to be able to build on derivatives of other people's content, so give us a license that does that.' And we were like, "well, that's something we hadn't thought about, let's do it!" And so we did it.
Langs[edit]
How international is your concept of the Creative Commons? I know you've been translating the statement of various licenses into different languages.
LL: Technically, our licenses are [each] designed to be enforceable internationally. To the extent that there are dangers caused by local weirdnesses in copyright law in particular countries, we launched the International Commons movement to create localized versions (that are also themselves enforceable internationally). In part that was to deal with the legal problem. But in part it was also to help build the movement around the International Commons project, so that many many more people would become involved, and not perceive it as a top-down American solution to an international problem.
Other[edit]
WQ: Do you think the reason we don't have more extensive reuse of content today is that tools that make reuse easy haven't always been there?
LL: That's right, and also access to the material is not ibid.? robust or universal. And that's beginning to change as archive.org and similar sites begin to make content like this available, it will begin to penetrate and people will begin to use it in lots of really powerful ways. And the more that it happens, the more it will be easy for people like me to argue, this is an important part of culture
(Re: the paradox of the copyleft movement relying on the infrastructure that made old copyright laws incompatible with the digital era)
LL: And the same point could be made about the Free Software movement. It's only because of the automatic way that copyright functions with software that the GPL has its effect; the Free Software Foundation is quite clear that they don't believe they're writing a contract, they believe they're producing a software license, but that distinction is only an important distinction because copyright law creates more opportunities for control in a digital context than it does in a physical context.
WQ: Maybe China will start to get angry with us....
LL: Well, it would be a bad thing for Chinese to lose access to Wikipedia, of course, but there's no reason why we couldn't begin to build the world such that China does... it's not a like China could bring it down for the rest of the world..
WQ: Creative Commons discussed a license this summer specifically for translations, but the discussion petered out. What current options are there for a license that just allows translations and nothing else?
LL: One of the reasons the discussion has petered out is because there's a genuine question about whether it's needed. If you use a license that says "derivatives only", the most obvious derivative is translation. So that would be allowing translation but nothing more. Then the question is, is it worth it to add another layer of complexity to say, "the particular kind of derivative work I'm authorizing, exclusively, is translation"?
[re: what other barriers exist?] LL: One thing we're seeing, in the dance between free software and free culture, is that the gap between them is shrinking. We see that explicitly in the context of Flash. We have said from the start, Creative Commons licenses are not software licenses. People who do Flash say, "what are we supposed to license under, a software or a content license?" It's a great question.
LL: ...And I think we're certainly thinking about strategies to [make free licenses interoperable], and I know people on the free software side of the world are thinking about strategies to do that.
Because all of us have the same objective, which is to facilitate and spread free software, free culture, whatever you want to call it, and not to let the legal form get in the way of that objective.
[on WP vs CC notions of creative authorship/reputation]
LL:... But what Wikipedia does is take articles, and have other people add to them or change them or modify them, but each one of those steps is an individual taking a step.
WQ: We find that people who contribute don't think of themselves as individual contributors, and once they do, they start to have slightly different desires for authorship and accreditation.
[on whether the notion of authorship is changing in our culture]
LL: Let's be clear about the way copyright culture functions right now. 'Work for hire'... is becoming a dominant mode of copyright creation. You go to work for an enterprise [and] your copyright becomes the enterprise copyright.
When someone at Disney does some amazing new cartoon or some amazing new film, they might feel that's theirs, but... it's Disney's. The same kind of ambiguity exists in the context of Wikipedia. And the objective should be... to make sure expectations are properly fit to the context.
novel uses of WP content for copyright advocacy[edit]
(amazing content in these quotes, but too vague and too different from the rest of the interview to include it; deserving of its own small, focused piece next time)
LL: I've seen places in Wikipedia that develop in ways that are half a step [from] the place where this [content] is getting reused and powerful -- ways that would be very valuable to the objective of Wikipedia...
WQ: What places are you thinking of?
LL: The way that you can link directly into sound files, for example, invites links that mix together sound files. That would help support the message of a particular entry. That's an obvious extension to the objective of a perpetually live encyclopedia.
WP trademark[edit]
WQ: One trademark difficulty that we have today is distinguishing the use of the term "Wikipedia" as it refers to the encyclopedia as a whole, from its website, which is to say wikipedia.org. Are there instances where it's possible to continue to allow people to use the title of the work, but to distinguish a term from that kind of name-derivative?
LL: That's a hard trademark question, too hard for me. But that's something you really -- I can point you to people who can answer that.
Other[edit]
[Detail about copyright term variations for multimedia] LL: ... The hardest feature of copyright law for projects like Wikipedia, or one of the hardest features, is the variability of copyright terms internationally. So in the US, for works before 1978, the term is still determined by a fixed # of years; outside of the US, the term is determined by life of the author + a certain # of years, but in an important class of works like recordings, for example, in the US, recordings are government by the same term that governs ordinary copyright works, so for example a recording gets 95 years protection, but in most of Europe, a recording gets /50/ years protection.
LL ... (about copyleft) It's not an important practical fight, because software that's 95 years old won't be useful when the term ends.
In Closing[edit]
WQ: Finally, is there a picture of you in the public domain that we could use? LL: Any photo that's on my site. All of it's available. WQ: Thank you!