Larry Lessig gets TEDsters to their feet, whooping and whistling, following this elegant presentation of "three stories and an argument." The Net's most adored lawyer brings together John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights, and the "ASCAP cartel"TED | Talks | Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law (video)
Arbitrators have ruled that Antigua can suspend its intellectualproperty obligations to the United States in retaliation for the U.S. prohibition of online gambling.In a 97-page report (PDF) released last week, a panel weighing Antigua's complaint that the
online gambling ban violates free trade agreements said that Antigua has no effective trade sanctions against the United States in terms of services and agreed that the country could suspend copyright, trademark, and intellectual property obligations.The decision means Antigua can take copyright-protected U.S. goods, like CDs and software, and sell them without copyright protection. The value of the goods can total up to $21 million a year to satisfy the supposed damages the country has suffered.
The ruling estimated Antigua's trade loss at $21 million, which is less than the country estimated but more than the United States estimated. Antigua claimed $3.4 billion in losses; the United States said the country would lose $500,000.
It was a parody, a take-off; it was built upon Steamboat Bill. Steamboat Bill was produced in 1928, no [waiting] 14 years--just take it, rip, mix, and burn, as he did [laughter] to produce the Disney empire. This was his character. Walt always parroted feature-length mainstream films to produce the Disney empire, and we see the product of this. This is the Disney Corporation: taking works in the public domain, and not even in the public domain, and turning them into vastly greater, new creativity. They took the works of this guy, these guys, the Brothers Grimm, who you think are probably great authors on their own. They produce these horrible stories, these fairy tales, which anybody should keep their children far from because they're utterly bloody and moralistic stories, and are not the sort of thing that children should see, but they were retold for us by the Disney Corporation. Now the Disney Corporation could do this because that culture lived in a commons, an intellectual commons, a cultural commons, where people could freely take and build. It was a lawyer-free zone.
Let's talk about software patents. There's a guy, Mr. Gates, who's brilliant, right? He's brilliant. A brilliant business man; he has some insights, he is even a brilliant policy maker. Here's what he wrote about software patents: "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today." Here's the first thing I'm sure you've read of Bill Gates that you all 100 percent agree with. Gates is right. He is absolutely right. Then we shift into the genius business man: "The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors." Excluding future competitors.
