Luis Villa just pointed me to this excellent review in the Wall Street Journal of Larry Lessig’s Free Culture:
Free Culture, in short, is an insightful, entertaining brief for changing our copyright policy. There is just one problem. Mr. Lessig aims most of his arguments at people like himselfstandard-issue Howard Dean liberals. Bad choice. He should be talking to conservatives. Viewed up close, copyright bears little resemblance to the kinds of property that conservatives value. Instead, it looks like a constantly expanding government program run for the benefit of a noisy, well-organized interest grouplike Superfund, say, or dairy subsidies, except that the benefits go not to endangered homeowners or hardworking farmers but to the likes of Barbra Streisand and Eminem.
It looks like Superfund in other ways, too. Copyright is a trial lawyer’s dreama regulatory program enforced by private lawsuits where the plaintiffs have all the advantages, from injury-free damages awards to liability doctrines that extract damages from anyone who was in the neighborhood when an infringement occurred.
Quite so. The advocates of constantly expanding the scope of copyright have managed to cloak their rent-seeking agenda in the mantle of free markets and private property. And unfortunately, most of their critics have made it easy by deploying left-wing rhetoric. The result is that most people on the right-hand side of the political spectrum–the side that’s in power in Washington right now–reflexively line up with the rent seekers, not because they’ve given the issue any real thought, but simply because they perceive them as being on “their side.”
But if “conservative” is understood in the Barry Goldwater/Ronald Reagan mold of limited government and free markets, there’s nothing conservative about the copyright cartel’s agenda. Advocates of sensible copyright laws desperately need to find ways to talk about their agenda that Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians find more appealing.
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