A bit quietly, something ended the other day when Lessig packed it in, leaving the unproblem of intellectual property and digital media behind. Having beaten the drum and been a leader of the idea that copyright should not apply to expressions, much to the disgust of the creators of ideas who own and make money off of those expressions, we now find ourselves in a world where the proprietary interest has won out. The “mash-up” world of 2004 that Boingsters would have had us believe in never was just as the world of groceries bought via the internet promised in 1998 disappeared.
This is a wise decision as, in one way, nothing much as really changed from the effort while in another the world has largely moved on. Simon of Living in Dryden illustrates it all very neatly in this passage from a recent post:
About ten years ago, I went to a conference on web development. Everyone was talking about ‘disintermediation’ and how “brick and mortar stores” would get crushed. Consumers would be able to go straight to the manufacturer’s web site, or to a shopping web site of some kind, and order their products directly. All of the supply chains and middlemen (intermediaries) were going to vanish, leaving only producers of goods and their warehousing and delivery. Or something like that. That hasn’t really happened, except in a few categories of items where the Web turned out to be especially effective. Computer geeks, maybe because they heard this story enough times, often buy computer products online. It’s easy for an online bookstore to maintain the tremendous inventory some book buyers dream of, and for some reason a lot of people seem to like making travel reservations online. Even when it sort of works, though, this “disintermediation” is kind of perverse, sending goods all over the place from all over the place. Large online sellers, like Amazon, end up with hugely complicated supply chain management systems and warehouses all over to manage this process. Importers, wholesalers, and web site managers still act as ‘intermediaries’. Is it really that much less mediated than going to a store?
In January 2005 when Lessig was a bit more of a popular ideas man, I listened to him interviewed on NPR’s The Connection and took down some notes on the vision. He believed that under copyright the rules for content in text differed from that in film and music and image. The “next generation of blogs,” he said, will mix to create more powerful social commentary. Never.
That’s because plenty hasn’t really happened. News media have taken on a form of inter-connection with consumers but the balance has not really altered. Blogs have not advanced beyond scrapbooks and on-line journals but also things like YouTube, MySpace and Facebook have made it easy to participate in on-line experience without adding much substantive content and certainly without any real collaboration. And no one is surprised now when deals are made to ensure rights holders interests are respects and thereby, rather than being an obstacle, used as a platform for further development. These things are good. There has been no disruptive revolution, no need to fire millions of grocery store clerks, truckers and shippers or artists. Subscriptions to local newspapers are up. There has been change and the good from digital media have enhanced what was. But no revolution.
Like most with strong firmly-held beliefs, Lessig worked hard, thought a lot of good thoughts but missed the point…as, to be fair, a lot of people did. Alarmingly, however, he now wants to rid us all of “corruption” which he seems to define this way:
In one of the handful of opportunities I had to watch Gore deliver his global warming Keynote, I recognized a link in the problem that he was describing and the work that I have been doing during this past decade. After talking about the basic inability of our political system to reckon the truth about global warming, Gore observed that this was really just part of a much bigger problem. That the real problem here was (what I will call a “corruption” of) the political process. That our government can’t understand basic facts when strong interests have an interest in its misunderstanding.
That form of corruption appears to be an effort to stomp out disagreeing with Lessig. Here we go again. Good luck on that one.