Future Of Ideas An Overview...

In the process of making a film, a director must “clear rights.” A film based on a copyrighted novel must get the permission of the copyright holder. A song in the opening credits requires the permission of the artist performing the song. These are ordinary and reasonable limits on the creative process, made necessary by a system of copyright law. Without such a system, we would not have anything close to the creativity that directors such as Guggenheim have produced.
The stuff that appears in the film incidentally like Posters on a wall in a dorm room, a can of Coke held by the “cigarette smoking man,” an advertisement on a truck in the background. These are creative works and have to be copyrighted but up to some limits as if everything is copyrighted then creative peoples can not proceed.
All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological and hence cultural, evolution in generations. This revolution has produced the most powerful and diverse spur to innovation of any in modern times. But I do mean to convince you of a blind spot in our culture, and of the harm that this blind spot creates. In the understanding of this revolution and of the creativity it has induced, we systematically miss the role of a crucially important part. We therefore don’t even notice as this part disappears or, more important, is removed. Blind to its effect, we don’t watch for its demise. Lessig is talking about not copyrighting the stuff that appears in the film incidentally. He considered it just unawareness of people and called it as ‘blindness’.
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime and only lukewarm support are forthcoming from those who would prosper under the new. Their support is indifferent partly from fear and partly because they are generally incredulous, never really trusting new things unless they have tested them by experience. There are two futures in front of us, the one we are taking and the one we could have. The one we are taking is easy to describe. Take the Net, mix it with the fanciest TV, add a simple way to buy things, and that’s pretty much it. It is a future much like the present. America Online (AOL), it is the most cynical image of Time Warner’s marriage to AOL: the forging of an estate of large-scale networks with power over users to an estate dedicated to almost perfect control over content. That content will not be “broadcast” to millions at the same time; it will be fed to users as users demand it, packaged in advertising precisely tailored to the user. But the service will still be essentially one-way, and the freedom to feed back, to feed creativity to others, will be just about as constrained as it is today. These constraints are not the constraints of economics as it exists today not the high costs of production or the extraordinarily high costs of distribution.
The most dramatic are the changes in the costs of distribution; but just as important are the hangs in the costs of production. Both are the consequences of going digital: digital technologies create and replicate reality much more efficiently than nondigital technology does.
It is in the chapter that “consumers” do more than simply consume Apple Computers provides its users to just use our systems to produce different things relating to music. Yes, these are strictly consumers of Internet services. Because for example music mixer, they are not bringing all the music components at a place to play them to build a music or melody but they are using just ready made mixers manufactured by diff. companies.
Over the past hundred years, much of the heat in political argument has been about which system for controlling resources—the state or the market—works best. The Cold War was a battle of just this sort. The socialist East placed its faith in the government to allocate and regulate resources; the free-market West placed its faith in the market for allocating or regulating resources. The struggle was between the state and the market. The question was which system works best. That war is over. For most resources, most of the time, the market trumps the state. There are exceptions, of course, and dissenters still. But if the twentieth century taught us one lesson, it is the dominance of private over state ordering. Markets work better than Tammany Hall in deciding who should get what, when. Or as Nobel Prize–winning economist Ronald Coase put it, whatever problems there are with the market, the problems with government are far more profound. This, however, is a new century; our questions will be different. The issue for us will not be which system of exclusive control the government or the market should govern a given resource. The question for us comes before: not whether the market or the state but, for any given resource, whether that resource should be controlled or free.
“Free.” So deep is the rhetoric of control within our culture that whenever one says a resource is “free,” most believe that a price is being quoted free, that is, as in zero cost. But “free” has a much more fundamental meaning in French, Libra rather than gratis, or for us non–French speakers, and as the philosopher of our age and founder of the Free Software Foundation Richard Stallman puts it, “free, not in the sense of free beer, but free in the sense of free speech.” A resource is “free” if one can use it without the permission of anyone else; or the permission one needs is granted neutrally. So understood, the question for our generation will be not whether the market or the state should control a resource, but whether that resource should remain free. A resource is produced says nothing about how access to that resource is granted. Production is different from consumption. And while the ordinary and sensible rule for most goods is the “pay me this for that”. Free resources have been crucial to innovation and creativity; that without them, creativity is crippled.
The future that we could have is much harder to describe. It is harder because the very premise of the Internet is that no one can predict how it will develop. The architects who crafted the first protocols of the Net had no sense of a world where grandparents would use computers to keep in touch with their grandkids. And as I will argue, there are strong reasons why many are trying to rebuild these constraints: they will enable these existing and powerful interests to protect themselves from the competitive threat the Internet represents. The old, in other words, is bending the Net to protect itself against the new this context of creativity has been changed by the Internet. The examples will show how many of the constraints that affected real-space creativity have been removed by the architecture, and original legal context, of the Internet. These limitations, perhaps justified before, are justified no more. Or at least, were justified no more. For the argument of the third and final part of this book is that the environment of the Internet is now changing. Features of the architecture both legal and technical that originally created this environment of free creativity are now being changed. They are being changed in ways that will reintroduce the very barriers that the Internet originally removed.
These barriers, however, don’t have the neutral justification that the constraints of real-space economics do.15 If there are constraints here, it is simply because we are building them in. And as I will argue, there are strong reasons why many are trying to rebuild these constraints: they will enable these existing and powerful interests to protect themselves from the competitive threat the Internet represents. The old, in other words, is bending the Net to protect itself against the new. This is all about the chapter “Free” of book THE FUTURE OF IDEAS.