Total Legal Relevance

Long and interesting critique of the google books settlement: http://www.tnr.com/print/article/the-love-culture.

Lessig argues that GBS is effectively creating the kind of celestial jukebox that some early digital media analysts (e.g., Paul Goldstein) thought might be the savior of the content industries; Lessig questions what we lose when we “make every access to our culture a legally regulated event.” Although I’m a little skeptical of the basis of his preservationist rhetoric–for one, he frequently appeals to a mythical library & used bookstore culture that likely doesn’t exist today for most people–this doesn’t mean that library-talk isn’t metaphorically useful to the larger project of preserving balance “between the part of culture that is effectively and meaningfully regulated by copyright and the part of culture that is not.” Still, it’s notable that this distinction between regulated and unregulated culture is challenged by the private regulation system (Samuelson, pdf) set up by the settlement. Does this imply that public regulators should take it as their task to carve out regulation-free zones so that private entities can’t determine and control access within those spaces? Anyway, well worth a read.

Also, his proposed registration/formalities solution dovetails with my recent submission (pdf) to the FCC’s National Broadband Plan inquiry, which is nice. Here’s Lessig’s proposal:

A better solution would be to shift to the copyright owners some of the burden of keeping the copyright system up to date, by establishing an absolute obligation to register their work, at least after a limited time. Thus, for example, five years after a work is published, a domestic copyright owner should be required to maintain her copyright by registering the work. Failure to register would mean that the work would pass into the public domain. Successful registration would mean a simple way to identify who owned what. … The government should not run these registries. They are the sort of thing that the Googles and Microsofts of the world should do. Rather, the government should establish the minimal protocols for these registries, and permit registrars to compete to service that registry.