Rich but never bitter

When I first started working at Microsoft, Lawrence Lessig was someone to love to hate. After all, he testified for the government at the anti-trust trial. Now that I no longer work for Microsoft, I've taken an interesting second look at Lessig as a proponent of free software and free culture. In The People Own Ideas! he reports on the World Social Forum held recently in Porto Alegre, Brazil. A central theme is the extreme view of ownership taken by contemporary American culture:

But the economy of free software is still an economy. It produces wealth; it inspires growth; it spreads services broadly within a society. It functions differently than the economy of proprietary software--different scarcities are traded--but it is still an economy. And literally billions of dollars have been invested to make it flourish.

The same is true of free culture. Many read "free culture" to mean that artists don't get paid. But here, too, the difference is not that one approach (proprietary culture) builds an economy while the other (free culture) does not. In the way that I've use the term, free culture describes the economy that governed creative industries for at least the first 186 years of the American republic. More importantly, proprietary culture has never yet governed any creative economy, anywhere. No society has ever imposed the level of control that the proprietary culture of digital technologies and DRM would enable.

In the "ownership society" the assumption is that everything can and should be privately owned. I don't think private property is a bad thing, but perhaps a political philosophy that brought us Enron deserves a more critical examination. Does it really make sense that everything should be privately owned? Does a governement that grants long term copyright and patent franchises to entrenched interests really promote a "free market". Perhaps the kids in Brazil are on to something.