Lawrence Lessig gave a stirring address at a Dublin film festival, warning his audience that the draconian re-casting of copyright will make our historical period a cipher in the future.
Copyright laws in the United States are placing the control of material into an increasingly "fixed and concentrated" group of corporate hands, he said. Five record companies now control 85 percent of music distribution, for example.
Because copyright law now also precludes "derivative use" of copyright material, people cannot develop new material based on copyrighted work without permission. Lessig said this radically changes how human culture will evolve, since "the property owner has control over how that subsequent culture is built."
This restriction also stymies technological innovation, as developers cannot follow the long-established practice of taking existing code and enhancing it to produce something new, he said.
Because companies in industries such as music, publishing and film routinely demand that artists hand over copyright on their creative work, "kids don't own their own culture," said Electronic Frontier Foundation founder John Perry Barlow, who also attended the conference.
"The period of copyright primacy is going to end up as a huge hole in the cultural record."
