Here's an excerpt from David Post's review in Reason (which is generally quite positive): http://www.reason.com/0411/cr.dp.free.shtml For instance, Lessig’s proposal for an Internet-wide compulsory licensing scheme -- a fixed, government-set royalty rate covering all music downloads -- strikes me as unwise. There are, to begin with, serious practical and theoretical problems with any scheme that sets a single (per-byte?) price to cover all musical works. More importantly, under a compulsory licensing scheme, the government is suddenly the arbiter of all transactions; every music download becomes, literally, a federal case. The potential for government snooping, not to mention the administrative nightmare, gives me pause. And I have some other nagging doubts that Lessig never quite dispels. It’s undeniable that the scope of copyright has expanded vastly during the last few decades. But there is a respectable slice of opinion that views this expansion much more positively than Lessig does -- one that welcomes these developments. The second follows. -Declan -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Review of Lessig's Free Culture Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2005 15:01:16 GMT From: The Progress & Freedom Foundation <mail@private> To: Declan McCullagh <declan@private> FROM THE IPCENTRAL.INFO WEBLOG... 12.29.2004 Review of Lessig's Free Culture The December 2004 issue of the Virginia Law Review contains a skeptical review of Larry Lessig's book Free Culture, entitled Larry Lessig's Dystopian Vision, by Prof. Julia D. Mahoney of the UVA law school. (Linked by permission of the VLR.) Her conclusion: It is easy to wish that Lessig had decided to write another sort of book. Had he started from the premises that adjusting property rights to technological and societal change has posed significant challenges throughout U.S. history, and that it is impossible to state with complete confidence that any regime strikes (or has struck) the appropriate balance between providing incentives to creators and innovators and ensuring appropriate access to the fruits of their efforts, Lessig might have produced a thoughtful meditation on intellectual property in the Internet age. Instead, Lessig has opted to tell a dark, sweeping tale of a nation that for most of its history adjusted to societal and technological change with ease, but now teeters on the edge of an abyss of corporate control. The world depicted in the pages of Free Culture, however, is at odds with Lessig's dystopian vision, for it is a vibrant place where technological innovation, creative endeavors, and public discussion of political issues flourish to a degree that would have been scarcely imaginable to our forebears. That such a society faces some perplexing challenges should come as no surprise. Addressing these challenges will require a number of difficult determinations, including whether the hazards posed by various new technologies outweigh their benefits and how best to ensure that property rights evolve to promote the overall public interest. Regrettably, Free Culture promises to be of little help in crafting useful solutions to these genuine problems. Disclosure: Prof. Mahoney and I are related; she is my daughter. - posted by James DeLong @ 11:39 AM http://weblog.ipcentral.info/archives/2004/12/review_of_lessi.html _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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