THE FUTURE OF IDEAS (AN OVERVIEW)

COPYRIGHT LAWS:

In the process of film making the director must clear all the legal rights for example a song playing as a playback on the title numbers must have the permission of the singer who sung it. These are the reasonable restrictions which are governed by a copyright law.
Today if any piece of art or the story is recognized by anybody and u have just taken it incidentally than you have to clear the rights of that piece of information or art and must get it cleared. The copyright laws and restrictions which keep the check and balance on every little piece of information are a big obstacle in the process of creativity. For example if you have a bunch of people which have submitted everything in the process of doing some task or some creative work and then in spite of the spirits that they had put in the process they have to submit all their work to the lawyers. The lawyers than decide that which things you can use and which you cannot and the whole story is alters. This control creates burden as well as the cost of reproduction or editing in the process. This procedure is responsible for the unwanted delay in the release or opening of the new art work. In the past times many films have been postponed due to the claimers on the basis of the copyright laws. The ordinary people think these laws as “silly ideas”.

A BLINDSPOT:

All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological and hence cultural, revolution in generations. This revolution has produced the most powerful spur to innovation of any in modern times. Believing we know what makes prosperity work, ignoring the nature of the actual prosperity all around, we change the rules within which the Internet revolution lives. These changes will end the revolution. It doesn’t mean “the Internet” will end. “The Internet” is with us forever, even if the character of “the Internet” will change. I do mean to convince you of a blind spot in our culture, and of the harm that this blind spot creates. In the understanding of this revolution and of the creativity it has induced, we systematically miss the role of a crucially important part. We therefore don’t even notice as this part disappears or, more important, is removed. Blind to its effect, we don’t watch for its demise. This blindness will harm the environment of innovation. Not just the innovation of Internet entrepreneurs but also the innovation of authors or artists more generally. This blindness will lead to changes in the Internet that will under-mine its potential for building something new—a potential realized in the original Internet, but increasingly compromised as that original Net is changed.

There are two futures in front of us, the one we are taking and the one we could have. The one we are taking is easy to describe. Take the Net, mix it with the fanciest TV, add a simple way to buy things, and that’s pretty much it. The forging of an estate of large-scale networks with power over users to an estate dedicated to almost perfect control over content. That content will not be “broadcast” to millions at the same time it will be fed to users as users demand it. But the service will still be essentially one-way, and the freedom to feed back, to feed creativity to others, will be just about as con-strained as it is today. These constraints are not the constraints of economics as it exists today not the high costs of production or the extraordinarily high costs of distribution. These constraints instead will be burdens created by law by intellectual property as well as other government-granted exclusive rights. The promise of many-to-many communication that defined the early Internet will be replaced by a reality of many, many ways to buy things and many, many ways to select among what is offered.

Yet there are elements of this future that we can fairly imagine. They are the consequences of falling costs, and hence falling barriers to creativity. The most dramatic are the changes in the costs of distribution; but just as important are the changes in the costs of production. Both are the consequences of going digital: digital technologies create and replicate reality much more efficiently than non digital technology does. This will mean a world of change. These changes could have an effect in every sphere of social life.

Digital tools dramatically change the horizon of opportunity for those who could create something new. And not just for those who would create something “totally new,” if such an idea is even possible. Digital technology could enable an extraordinary range of ordinary people to become part of a creative process. To move from the life of a “consumer” of music and not just music, but film, and art, and commerce to a life where one can individually and collectively participate in making something new. But now we have the potential to expand the reach of this creativity to an extraordinary range of culture and commerce. Technology could enable a whole generation to create remixed films, new forms of music, digital art, a new kind of storytelling, writing, a new technology for poetry, criticism, political activism and then, through the infrastructure of the Internet, share that creativity with others. This is the art through which free culture is built.

CAPITALISM VS COMMUNISM:

Over the past hundred years, much of the heat in political argument has been about which system for controlling resources—the state or the market—works best. The Cold War was a battle of just this sort. The socialist East placed its faith in the government to allocate and regulate resources; the free-market west placed its faith in the market for allocating or regulating resources. The struggle was between the state and the market. The question was which system works best. That war is over. For most resources, most of the time, the market trumps the state. There are exceptions, of course, and dissenters still. But if the twentieth century taught us one lesson, it is the dominance of private over state ordering.

FREE RESOURCES:

This, however, is a new century; our questions will be different. The issue for us will not be which system of exclusive control—the government or the market—should govern a given resource. The question for us comes before: not whether the market or the state but, for any given resource, whether that resource should be controlled or free.

Whenever one says a resource is “free,” most believe that a price is being quoted—free, that is, as in zero cost. But “free” has a much more fundamental meaning. A resource is “free” if

(1) One can use it without the permission of anyone else.
(2) The permission one needs is granted neutrally.

So understood, the question for our generation will be not whether the market or the state should control a resource, but whether that resource should remain free.

The availability of a resource that remains outside the exclusive control of someone else whether a government or a private individual has been central to progress in science and the arts. It will also remain central to progress in the future. Yet lurking in the background of our collective thought is a hunch that free resources are somehow inferior. That nothing is valuable that isn’t restricted.

This is the taken-for-granted idea that I spoke of at the start: that control
is good, and hence more control is better; that progress always comes from dividing resources among private owners; that the more dividing we do, the better off we will be; that the free is an exception. Production is different from consumption. And while the ordinary and sensible rule for most goods is the “pay me this for that” model of the local convenience store, a second’s reflection reveals that there is a wide range of resources that we make available in a completely different way.

AFFECT OF FREE RESOURCES:

Free resources have been crucial to innovation and creativity; that without them, creativity is crippled. Thus, and especially in the digital age, the central question becomes not whether government or the market should control a resource, but whether a resource should be controlled at all. Just because control is possible, it doesn’t follow that it is justified. Instead, in a free society, the burden of justification should fall on him who would defend systems of control.

No simple answer will satisfy this demand. The choice is not between all or none. Obviously many resources must be controlled if they are to be produced or sustained. I should have the right to control access to my house and my car. The right to criticize a government official is a resource that is not, and should not be, controlled. I shouldn’t need the permission of the Einstein estate before I test his theory against newly discovered data. These resources and others gain value by being kept free rather than controlled. A mature society realizes that value by protecting such resources from both private and public control.

We need to learn this lesson again. The opportunity for this learning is the Internet. No modern phenomenon better demonstrates the importance of free resources to innovation and creativity than the Internet. To those who argue that control is necessary if innovation is to occur, and that more control will yield more innovation, the Internet is the simplest and most direct reply.

The environment of the Internet is now changing. Features of the architecture both legal and technical that originally created this environment of free creativity are now being changed. They are being changed in ways that will reintroduce the very barriers that the Inter-net originally removed. These barriers, however, don’t have the neutral justification that the constraints of real-space economics do. If there are constraints here, it is simply because we are building them in. And as I will argue, there are strong reasons why many are trying to rebuild these constraints: they will en-able these existing and powerful interests to protect themselves from the competitive threat the Internet represents. The old, in other words, is bending the Net to protect itself against the new.