Let’s Not Talk Viability

There’s a big conference on Internet Law going on in Brazil right now, and lots of smart and respectable folks are down there preaching to the choir about intellectual property issues like filesharing. In a session today, graciously blogged by Donna Wentworth, said smart folks demonstrated that they had read a lot of the Rawls, Coase, and other socioeconomic theory I’ve been slogging through. Too much, it seems, because like those theorists, the ideas being kicked around seemed to operate in a realm of, well, theory.

Terry Fischer, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, proposed a vast(ly unfeasable) system of tracking, taxes, and government subsidies that would compensate artists and free content to be distributed without restriction. There’s a lot of hard thought in his proposal, but it’s hardly an immediately viable solution to a pressing problem. I think I’m becoming something of a pragmatist, not just in this view but in all things. It seems better to come to a solution and get things moving than to plant yourself in an extreme camp and stay there. The ideas coming out of conferences like this sure are neat, but they won’t play in Hollywood or Capital Hill.

PS: Solutions, Not Just Complaining Recognizing that existing consumer-unfriendly legislation like the DMCA isn’t going anywhere, there are two things that should be done. Firstly, more lobbying by the tech industry, who’s been all talk thusfar, to prevent further restrictive legislation from getting passed. Meanwhile, since it appears unlikely that challenges to these laws are going to be effective in the present political climate, support of licensing schemes like the Creative Commons that dovetail with existing copyright law are the most realistic way to put more content into the public domain. The way law should work and the way does are two very different things. We should use the existing system to our advantage, rather than waste precious time musing about what could be in an ideal and wholly theoretical scenario."