Lessig in the NY Times

["jesposito" <jesposito@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I imagine readers of this list have already seen Lawrence Lessig's piece
on the Op-Ed page of Saturday's New York Times.  (I read it in hardcopy
and don't have the link available.)  I am skeptical about many of
Lessig's initiatives, but the policy recommendation he made in the Times
strikes me as excellent.  That recommendation was for there to be a
modest copyright tax (Lessig proposes $50 a year) to keep an already
published work under copyright.  Failure to pay the tax would push the
work into the public domain.

What would be the practical effect of such a tax?  One outcome, which is
the one Lessig focuses on, would be for numerous works that have been
out of print for years to enter the public domain--some because their
owners don't care about them and don't want to pay the tax, some because
their owners don't even know that these properties are in their
portfolios.  And then let the public domain do with these works what it
will.

Another outcome (more likely and more significant, in my opinion) is
that many holders of copyrights will pay the tax "just in case."  Some
holders will have large, taxed archives to tend to; the cost of
maintaining these archives is not negligible.  This will prompt such
holders to try to come up with ways to monetize those archives, which
will yield an abundance of new forms of electronic publishing.  The tax,
in other words, will foster innovation.

Since books go out of print for a reason and stay out of print for a
reason, it seems probable to me that the new uses of archives of books
will have less to do with the content or merit of any particular titles
(since books go out of print for a reason) and more to do with the
content in its aggregated form.  An out of print romance novel from 1927
has little value; a collection of a thousand such titles may have a
different kind of value, not literary or even as a "read" but as a data
mine, from which other extrapolations can be made.

Incidentally, the same issue of the Times has a column by Edward
Rothstein on Lessig's recent activities.  In my view, Rothstein takes
Lessig's measure exactly.

Joe Esposito