[Cc-uk] Lessig audio now up
Rob Myers
robmyers at mac.com
Fri Oct 8 18:16:54 EDT 2004
Lessig on moral rights, an impromptu answer as part of the Q&A. My
transcription, with "um"s, "right"s and "y'know"s stripped. E&OE. ;-)
"So moral rights are an extremely difficult complicating factor in
this. In some countries you technically can't give away your moral
rights. so that means we can't really offer the option of saying you
can make a derivative work of my work without my permission up front.
Some countries there are ways around that. Japan has this very
complicated way to get around it, so if you look at the Japanese
license it's a really huge license because they've gotta go through
every possible use and articulate 'yes, I'm waiving my moral rights
with respect to this possible use'. I thing we've got a real question
about what the importance or value of moral rights is going forward. To
the extent moral rights really do protect authors' control over their
creativity I'm all for them. To the extent moral rights just make it
harder for culture to be made available broadly I'm not for them. And I
think what we need to do is to evaluate what actually moral rights are
doing in this context, whether they're helping or not. Because there're
many contexts in which it's just forcing stuff to be blocked from being
made available broadly and I can see no public justification for that
at all.
Now you know one thing about this is the distance between Europe and
the United States. You used to be part of our tradition, which was we
only give out monopolies because we believe they're going to help the
public, that we give out the copyright monopoly because we believe it's
going to help the public. You guys were the first free culture lawyers
when you destroyed the power of the conger by passing limits on
copyright terms in 1710, which were finally recognised by the house of
lords in 1774. In 1774, for the first time, Shakespeare entered the
public domain. You did that because you saw the conger of publishers in
London was a choke on the ability for British culture to spread
broadly. - Or English culture to spread broadly, you were fighting the
Scottish at that time you were trying to steal your culture. But you
set the ideal which the Americans copied. Then you guys drifted off
toward Europe and became much closer and this kind of moral rights
conception than we are. We preserve the tradition which is we give out
government monopolies when it helps society as a whole, that's our
ideal, now that ideal has been captured by the modern-day conger,
Disney and the recording companies, so we need help once again, you
guys could be an inspiration here. But moral rights is a sort of cross
between these two traditions. "
- Rob.
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