Tweet
Lawrence Lessig marked his appointment as Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School with a lecture titled “Aaron’s Laws: Law and Justice in a Digital Age.”
The lecture focuses on the Aaron Swartz case which Lessig says he approaches less as an intellectual and more as a citizen and friend given his extensive personal history with Swartz. Lessig also clarified Swartz’s position on copyright.
At the center of [Aaron’s] struggle is and was copyright. In the debate between people who are pro and anti copyright, Aaron was on neither side.” Rather, he opposed “dumb copyright.” A perfect example was Swartz’s efforts to liberate data from PACER the database of public court records, which charged 8 cents a page. He was not violating copyright, technical restraints, terms of service or any other prohibitions. He had found a loophole. “A loophole for public good” as opposed to the loopholes used for private gain by lobbyists and tax lawyers.
Swartz did the same thing with the government’s database of issued copyrights. The PACER project got Aaron FBI surveillance; the copyright project, on the other hand, was met with approval by the Copyright Office.Using all this as proof Lessig continued to emphasize that Aaron was a hacker. He defines “hacker” as one who uses technical knowledge to make a better world.
Swartz’s FBI file details surveillance and monitoring of Swartz and Carl Malalmud in the wake of the PACER “hack.” The FBI monitored his online activity and conducted surveillance at his residence.
Lessig also offered his prescription that went beyond reforming the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act or “Aaron’s Law”
First: Aaron’s Law is great.
Second: we must destroy dumb copy right. Including overturning the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and defeating the Research Works Act, which would forbid the US Government from supporting open access research.
Third: End corruption; end money in politics; give the power back to the people.
Fourth: “Fix the obliviousness that we live our daily life with.” We have an obligation as citizens to pull back the government when it overreaches.
I would recommend watching the lecture in its entirety.
7 Comments
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About FDL News Desk
Too bad Aaron Swartz is not here to help with the copyright issues that Monsanto and PBO’s DoJ are arguing at SCOTUS.
Rise up, revolt!
Certainly the patenting of seeds including their seeds, when the latter can be blown anywhere by winds, is as “dumb” as it gets.
Let me add that the whole notion of intellectual property and copyright is a modern, that is, socially constructed concept (I suspect bound up with the rise of individualism concomitant with that of capitalism). In the ancient world the concept was so absent that the followers of Pythagoras attributed their own discoveries to him. Aaron might not have been so radical as to want an end to the entire regime, but the rest of us can dream.
No copyright and those who cannot create, but rather know how to make a buck off an idea, grab your idea run with it, make money and you don’t get a damn thing, not even your expenses for producing the original.
Yeah, right! The 1% would love that!
Thanks, DSWright.
First, time does not allow viewing of the video. So, please forgive me if any of my points in this post were already addressed in the lecture.
As I am sure you know, the Constitution assumes that patents and copyrights are useful and necesary things, that without them, people like Edison and Disney would have had little to no incentive to labor away for hours inventing movies or creating Mickey Mouse (or stealing same from the guys who first inventing the movies or first drew Mickey). And, btw, Shakespeare apparently had a lot of incentive to write without getting a dime from copyright. So did Euripides.
Making copyright violation an act of terrorism, however, is a whole other level.
So is operating at government at my expense, supposedly for my benefit, and then making me pay some private publisher (or get to a library) if I want or need to read a court decision.
That is not only common sense, it’s just. I should not have to pay both my government and a private publisher for the exact same court decision. let some court clerk put it on the internet, instead of handing it to a private book publisher.
The research papers of university researchers paid by private universities may be different, though.
They researchers are on a university payroll and using the facilities and staff for which the university has already paid. So, should the researcher be able to decide whether the research should be public, or does justice require giving the university a say, too?
Of course, the university example is further complicated by the fact that even private universities do not operate 100% on private money.
And what about an author? If one person wants to read my writing, I may license that person for a few pennies. However, if the entire world wants to read it because it is just that valuable, the price that I set might be very different. And shouldn’t I have some say about the price for which i am willing to write a work that the whole world wants to read?
However, when a hacker inserts himself between me and my potential customers by putting my output on the internet, no one but the hacker has a say in what my output is worth to the world. Is that fair?
Maybe I should be willing, even compelled, to work free for the common good, but, my Lord, that is a huge issue. And why does the hacker alone–and without a word to anyone else– get to decide the outcome of that philosophical, legal, moral and social debate?
I am not saying we should drive every copyright or patent violator to suicide, but jeez.
Bottom line, the issue is legally and morally more complicated than the term “common sense copyright” suggests.
If you haven’t seen the entire video, especially the questions at the end, you cannot imagine how many relevant issues that Lawrence Lessig presents. It is more than about copyright. It is about who should benefit from copyright. It is about the absurd practice of copyrighting public domain works. It is about the loss of the public domain as it gets digitized. It is about civil disobedience. It is about academic journals and government public domain documents. And it is about corporations who want the government to enforce violations of their terms of service as a felony.
Unless you watch it, your comments are likely to be way off target.
Here’s another of Larry’s lectures interweaving broadband, cybersecurity, copyright and corruption that is really good.
Unfortunately, I can’t find a link to the lecture that does an unusually exceptional job of explaining things to the uninitiated.
It’s really worth the time to listen to what he has to say.
Well, I did and afaik, copyright was not mentioned in the Q&A period.
So, what’s your point? Fixing dumb©. OK. We don’t want big business running over little people.
Years ago, I learned that the only thing that stands between us and big business was big government, and in one of the questions, the last one where is spoke of utter hopelessness because big government has been co-opted by big business. Well, I knew that. Before listening to the lecture.
It doesn’t change my stance on my ownership of my copyright. As to the 20 year extension, which seemed to be the trigger for the phrase dumb©, I can easily fix that in my will, if need be. If I want to give it away, then I can. That it aides in big business using big government to their ends, well, yes, in retrospect it was a brain-dead decision.
But then, most stuff from DC these days seems to be that.
Lawrence did a fine job in honoring Aaron. I am grateful for that. I hope Lawrence is correct in that MIT will do the right thing. Maybe that gets the ball rolling in another direction.