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Blog heresy: I’m sorry, but

1 comment on Blog heresy: I’m sorry, but

Blog heresy
: I’m sorry, but I just have to ask:

Is Lawrence Lessig overrated?

Well, the truth is, he has to be. Like Mother Theresa, he has been put up on a pedestal at nosebleed altitude. The blog admiration is blushworthy. No one is that brilliant. But Lessig doesn’t blush. He has someone maintain a third-person blog (in addition to his first-personal version) covering of all his personal happenings, like a year-round Christmas letter.

Of course, he’s a smart man and earnest.

But he lost the Eldred case, big time.

He was kept away from the Microsoft case for good reason; Microsoft was perfectly justified objecting to him advising the judge (and we now know what a bozo that judge was).

Now here’s Lessig proposing a ludicrious and unworkable copyright tax that would unfairly burden copyright holders and their heirs and create a gargantuan federal bureacracy and, by the way, offend American First Amendment sensibilities (let’s bring back the stamp tax!).

I’ve admired the guy but I fear that others admire him too much and I’m overdosed on the Lessig-worship. He’s mortal.

1 response to “Blog heresy: I’m sorry, but”

  1. alkali Avatar
    alkali

    Now here’s Lessig proposing a ludicrious and unworkable copyright tax that would unfairly burden copyright holders and their heirs and create a gargantuan federal bureacracy and, by the way, offend American First Amendment sensibilities (let’s bring back the stamp tax!).
    Lessig’s proposal is completely workable: the U.S. Copyright Office already maintains a registry of copyrighted material. All the copyright office would have to do is process the forms (and small payments) submitted by copyright holders, so that the registry would indicate whether the copyright was still alive. Because most copyrights are effectively abandoned well before the end of their terms, presumably the number of forms submitted would not be large compared to the yearly deluge of forms submitted to register new copyrights. A couple dozen staff members and a modification to the USCO’s computer system is all that would be required. The small fees that would be charged would likely be sufficient to pay for those costs.
    Your suggestion that the small fee Lessig proposes would constitute a violation of First Amendment rights is meritless for at least the following reasons:
    (1) There is no First Amendment right to copyright protection.
    (2) Lessig’s proposal is content-neutral. Content-neutral laws which incidentally affect speech (e.g., a sales tax on typing paper) do not violate the First Amendment.
    (3) There is already a small fee charged for copyright registration. No one objects to that as an unconstitutional “stamp tax”.(*)
    (* The objection to the Stamp Tax, in any event, was not that it burdened speech. The objection was that the British Parliament imposed it on the colonies at a time when the colonies were unrepresented in Parliament.)