Posted on 04/23/2008 9:03:24 AM PDT by Ramius
Another Odd Guru
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, April 22, 2008 4:20 PM
PT Election '08:
Killing God and destroying the right to private property are usually associated with communism. They also seem important to the prominent legal theorist serving as Barack Obama's technology adviser.
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Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig likes to treat his audiences to a short video that doesn't always go over so well. In it, Jesus Christ lip-syncs Gloria Gaynor's late '70s disco hit "I Will Survive," during which he strips down to just a diaper, effeminately struts along a city street and finally gets run over by a speeding bus. Lessig showed the film during his keynote address to the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco in 2006 (reportedly causing audience members to exit in disgust), as well as to an assembled group of Google employees recently.
The antics of a trendy left-wing law school teacher who doubles as cybergeek would normally be of little note. But a few years down the information superhighway we may be speaking of Justice Lawrence Lessig should Obama be elected president. Lessig and Obama were colleagues at the University of Chicago Law School.
Lessig's role today in the Obama campaign is not officially defined, but he campaigned passionately for him in Pennsylvania, where Lessig grew up and went to college, and has been utilized by the campaign to explain the candidate's positions on Internet law to the press.
[excerpt].
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
Like they say, you can tell a lot about someone by who they gather around them. While sure, you can't always hold somebody responsible for every nutty thing an associate might say or do... at some point a pattern does develop where obviously this guy *chooses* to associate with some pretty radical folk.
In fact, does Obama know anyone that *isn't* a radical?
There’s a lot more at the IBD site that’s worth reading.
The excerpt doesn’t capture the true scaryness.
Ping to a wacky thing I found.
Yet another layer peeled away at the onion. So far, everything about Mr. Obama still stinks.
Yeah, I saw articles on this the other day. This stuff just keeps rolling on out.
But the Obama-cultists don’t seem to notice...or care.
Yeah - I have a few wacky friends, but most of my friends are sortof normal.... aren’t they? ~looks around~ ;~)
Well, ‘cept for the elves...
Yah.
One of the scariest things about democracy is that most of the people that vote do so on merely a headline-level understanding of events. Most people don’t pay attention like us. Fortunately, many of them don’t bother to vote anyway. Usually. That’s why Obama is scary.
The bloom needs to come off the rose, and the sooner the better.
Oh yeah, we don't have that prob... uh... hm. Nevermind. :-)
This is kind of strange, because Lessig is actually quite a bit to the right of Obama. His work on bringing copyright back to the original constitutional intent, trying to reign in a Congress that has legislated beyond its granted powers, has been quite extensive.
It’s a sad sight to see Conservatives shift into blind defense of entrenched interests instead of shifting toward constructionist Constitutional positions, Lessig’s position on copyright echoes that of both Jefferson’s and Madison’s circles, yet we have Republicans defending Disney Co. by destroying the cultural heritage of the nation.
This is how Republicans will permanently destroy their own party, alienating two generations of young people by attacking Lessig’s work to attack Obama.
Like 19th century French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and coiner of the slogan "property is theft!" Lessig sees ownership as a constriction imposed on the masses. [...] Lessig wants to replace what he calls the "permission culture" that currently exists with a new "remix culture" that rejects the existence of copyrights and intellectual property.
I'm not sure how eliminating copyrights or the whole concept of intellectual property is more constitutional, or for that matter, a good idea. I don't know Lessig. Is this a misrepresentation of his position?
That isn't his position. It's not about eliminating copyrights. It's about bringing it back to the limited granted monopoly concept of the Constitution instead of the distorted semi-permanent rights system we have now that was bought by corporate lobbyists and puts the Constitution subordinate to international treaties.
Jefferson was so worried about the situation we have today developing that he didn't want any copyright or patent to exist at all. Government-granted monopolies (that is what copyrights and patents are) and their extreme penchant for abuse scared the hell out of him, and rightfully so. Madison was a bit naive and replied to Jefferson that the will of the people would keep abuses under control. We can see how well that worked out.
So, if you write a book, it’s OK for me to just run copies and sell them myself? That’s pretty cool. There’s a lot of good books I can make a lot of money on.
Again, you are off base. It’s much more complicated than that. Hundreds of tomes have been written on the subject. It’s been argued over in this country in the modern context continuously for over 60 years.
The gist of it is this: Mickey Mouse should be in the public domain. You should be able to make derivative works of Mickey Mouse because the copyright had expired. Instead, the cultural history of this country is firewalled behind the lobbying strength of the Disney Co. It’s not just Mickey Mouse, but almost every work of copyrighted art in the last 70+ years. The artistic/cultural history of our country is being removed from public display and thrown into vaults to never be seen/heard/read again.
The copyright and patent system was specifically crafted by our Founding Fathers to prevent this, the entrenched media interests in this country have fully subverted the people’s will, natural born rights, and the Constitutional provisions of this country’s founding.
I’m not a well versed defender of this position, you’ll have to search further if you want to better understand the situation.
I understand the position, I just don’t agree with it.
What other property “expires” it’s title? It’s tantamount to saying that your house and land should “expire” as your property, and that you only have use of it for a few years after which your neighbors can just rustle around in your garage whenever they wish. Copyright is property. A trademark is property.
I will submit that patents ARE different. A patent isn’t property. It’s a privilege of monopoly, a granted monopoly that the state agrees to enforce, and it can and should expire after some amount of time.
Copyright primer: What you write doesn't belong to you. Knowledge and creativity doesn't belong to any one person, it belongs to everybody. However, the Founders believed that authors could use a little monetary incentive to produce new works so that such production could benefit everyone, so they put the Copyright Clause in the Constitution.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.Basically, give the author a limited monopoly on the work in order to be able to make a buck on it in hopes that'll be incentive to make more. The original term was IIRC 14 years with registration, extendable for another 14. That's 28 years, a decent percentage of an adult's expected life, a good enough period in which to recoup the investment of time in the work plus some profit.
Nowdays the terms and protections have gotten rediculous. As Lessig said, the term is no longer limited, but "Forever on the installment plan." The purpose has been turned on its head, from enriching science and culture to enriching corporations and kowtowing to foreign interests.
You are not supposed to be able to run copies with a registered copyright of last year. But by the Constitution you should be able to run copies of a book an author who died 20 years ago wrote 50 years before his death. You should be able to find a 90 year-old classic movie where nobody knows who owns the rights and be able to reproduce and show it.
Lessig has been pushing to stop unconstitutional atrocities such as these. Unfortunately, he seems to have switched to politics. Sad.
I'm sorry, I'm simply never going to agree with that. If I do not own the product of my labor then I am a slave.
The problem starts right there. It is not a natural-right property. It is a government-granted limited monopoly on the work. It can only be considered property in the sense that the limited monopoly power is transferrable and can thus be bought and sold.
Consider that way back when the territorial government granted you a 40-year exclusive right to provide river crossings covering a section of river in exchange for bulding the docks and providing a ferry. The right makes money (no other way to cross the river for 50 miles either way) and the right can be bought and sold like property. But that right to the ferry crossing isn't your property, just a temporary monopoly right. The way you exercise the right for profit, the ferry itself, is property just as the means to exercise copyright, a physical book, is property.
Somebody can build a bridge right next to your operation as soon as your crossing-right expires, depriving you of income, just as somebody can re-publish your book as soon as your copy-right expires, depriving you of income. But your income was derived from an artificial temporary monopoly, so it shouldn't last forever.
I will submit that patents ARE different.
No they aren't. The power and purpose for both comes from that same clause in the Constitution. And although their terms haven't been abused in the way those for copyrights have, they have been abused into unconstitutionality in other ways.
Trademark is completely different from both copyright and patent. It is not rooted in the Copyright Clause and has no requirement for "limited times" or a purpose to advance the arts and sciences. It is business law designed to prevent market confusion. It is also a granted right that can be bought and sold as property, but it is not actually property.
This confusion is one reason I detest the term "Intellectual Property." It confuses people as to the difference between property and granted monopoly rights, and lumps four things (trade secrets also falls under "IP") with widely varying goals and governing laws under one vague and misleading term.
Then you are never going to agree with the Founders and the constitutional basis for copyrights and patents.
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