Lessig, Google Books and Copyright

There is a lot to digest in Lawrence Lessig’s epic article in The New Republic on the Google Books settlement. What Lessig, essentially, reinforces is that the way in which we think about copyright just isn’t going to work. Eric Schonfeld summarizes it nicely:

By breaking up books into different licensable parts, Lessig fears that we are going to encounter the same problem with books that we do today with film. He gives the example of documentary films which are sometimes nearly impossible to restore or preserve in digital form because the rights to every song and clip of archive footage need to be cleared again. This is an artifact of the types of licensing contracts that became the norm for film, where each constituent part of a work carries its own copyrights into perpetuity, making it more difficult down the road to update into digital form or pass along as a piece of shared culture. Up until now, books for the most part are treated as one single work.

And this isn’t going to work. It’s obviously not working for film, so it’s wrongheaded to assume it will work for books. But the larger picture is what I see as prevalent throughout the emerging digital culture. Yesterday I pointed to Scott Rosenberg’s thoughts on news organization business models. The problem is, people/organizations are reluctant to tear down the old model and start from the ground up.

I don’t know what this path is … but I know what it’s not, and it’s not transposing traditional norms onto digital culture. I do, however, hope to continue to think and learn what the new path may be.