Why India Needs Open Access

Anyone following the Open Access (OA) debate via mailing lists like the American Scientist Open Access Forum and Liblicense could mistakenly conclude that OA is an issue of relevance only to researchers and research institutions in the West. The reality, of course, is that OA is an international issue. Indeed, given the greater financial constraints they face, developing nations have far more to gain from Open Access.

In this first part of a two-part interview Professor Subbiah Arunachalam, Distinguished Fellow of the Chennai-based M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), explains to Richard Poynder why OA is so important for Indian research.

RP: Can you start by saying something about yourself and your background?

SA: I was born into an economically middle-class family — although socially in the upper crust — in a small town in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. I went to school and college close to my home, and I was fortunate to have had some excellent teachers. Thanks to my mother, I also developed a thirst for devoting myself to the public good.

RP: You are a chemist by training?

SA: Yes. I started out as a student of chemistry, and after obtaining a Masters in Chemistry at Annamalai University in 1963, I took a research assistant’s job at the Central Electrochemical Research Institute, Karaikudi. I worked there for 21 months, doing research in electroplating.

In May 1965, I moved to New Delhi, to work as an editorial assistant in the Publications & Information Directorate of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR). Then in 1969, I took three years' leave to pursue research in physical chemistry at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore.

RP: It was at the IISc that you developed an interest in information science I believe?

SA: That's right. While I was at the IISc I spent a lot of time in the library, where I started assisting students (and faculty) who were looking for information. Years later, when asked if he knew me, a professor of organic chemistry told me that I was a living legend in the campus, and frequently referred to as "the tall man with glasses who will help anyone in need in the library".

Flair for information science

RP: Did you take a course in information science?

SA: No. I never took a course in information science or librarianship. I simply developed a natural flair for some aspects of information science, largely focused on the needs of students of science seeking information for research, and those wanting to look at and "evaluate" performance in scientific research.

Anyway, in 1973, after three and a half years of not-so-successful research in the lab, I was asked to take on the job of editor of publications, and secretary, at the Indian Academy of Sciences — an institution founded in 1934 by Sir C V Raman, India’s only Nobel Laureate in Science.

RP: Where you set about re-organising the Academy's journals?

SA: Indeed, and my first task was to convince management that the Academy needed subject-specific journals, rather than the omnibus Proceedings of the Academy, published in two sections.

RP: Was that an easy task?

SA: Well, there was some opposition from older Fellows of the Academy, but the management agreed to go ahead, and we started by creating a new journal for physics (Pramana), which was until then part of the Proceedings of the Academy, Section A. Today, instead of the original two sections of the Proceedings, the Academy publishes ten subject-specific titles.

RP: In 1975 you returned to CSIR’s Publication Directorate?

SA: Yes, and I continued there until 1992. During that time, apart from editing journals and writing popular science articles, I started teaching information science at the Indian National Scientific Documentation Centre, and doing research in scientometrics.

RP: And at that time you also joined the editorial boards of a number of journals?

SA: Actually that started in the late 1970s. Gene Garfield, who has been a strong influence on my professional development, asked me to join the editorial board of Current Contents in 1977; and I have been on the editorial board of the Journal of Information Science since its very first issue in 1979. Subsequently, I also joined the editorial boards of a number of other journals, including Scientometrics, Public Understanding of Science, and Current Science.

RP: What are your primary interests today?

SA: Currently, I am active in two areas, in both of which my flair for information work comes in handy. For more than ten years I have been a full-time volunteer at the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), in Chennai. There I am part of the Information Village Research Project, which uses new ICTs to empower rural communities, and an adviser to the National Virtual Academy.

I also continue to look at how we can improve access to information in developing countries, and how the literature can be used to quantify and assess science. So part of my work addresses the needs of scientists, and the other part — ICT-enabled development — addresses the needs of the poor.

As part of the latter work I am on the Executive Committee of the Global Knowledge Partnership, and on the International Advisory Board of The International Institute for Communication and Development (IICD). I am also one of the three Secretaries of Mission 2007, which aims to bring the knowledge revolution to all 637,000 villages in India, and a member of the Working Group on Libraries set up by the National Knowledge Commission.

Advocate for open access

RP: That sounds like a demanding workload. Yet you still have time available for advocating for Open Access?

SA: Well, I actually spend about one-third of my working day, and sometimes even more, on OA advocacy and promotion.

RP: When did you first take an interest in Open Access?

SA: My interest in improving access to information for scientists in the developing world started in the early 1970s, when I was still a research student at the Indian Institute of Science.

My first article on information as the key to science development, for instance, appeared in 1975, in Science Today, India’s best-known popular science journal. I also spoke about the special needs of researchers in the developing world with regard to information access at the first ISI meeting on Advances in Information Access, in Philadelphia, in 1982. There I advocated for differential pricing for journals and databases and, wherever possible, free distribution.

My interest in promoting Open Access specifically started around 1996, when I began working as a visiting faculty at the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai.

RP: In an article you published on Open Access last September in the Asian information newspaper Access you said "papers written by Indian scientists, often with support from Indian taxpayers' money, are not seen, read or cited by other Indian researchers." What is the problem here?

SA: The issue is quite simple: research performed in India, and funded by Indian taxpayers, is reported in a few thousand journals, both Indian and foreign. Since some of these journals are very expensive, many Indian libraries — including sometimes the author's own institutional library — are not able to subscribe to them. As consequence, other Indian scientists working in the same, or related, areas are unable to read these papers. This is a problem common to all developing countries.

RP: How can Open Access resolve these problems for Indian researchers?

SA: If all these papers were published in OA journals, or if the authors made them freely available on the Web by self-archiving them — either in institutional OA archives or in central archives like arXiv and CiteSeer — then the problem would vanish.

Two routes

RP: As your answer implies, there are currently two main ways to provide OA to research literature: the Gold Route (in which OA publishers charge researchers, or more usually their funders, to publish papers, and then make those papers freely available on the Web), and the Green Route (where authors continue to publish in traditional subscription-based journals and then self-archive their papers themselves on the Web). In a paper you published with US-based OA advocate Peter Suber in World-Information City last October, you argued that self-archiving is the best route for Indian researchers. Why?

SA: I would point out that not all gold route OA journals charge authors (or indeed their funders) a publication fee. Currently, for instance, not a single Indian OA journal charges author-side fees.

But to answer your question: I believe that OA archiving is a better option because it would allow us to achieve 100% OA more quickly. Today there are not many Gold OA journals, so compelling authors to publish their work only in the few OA journals that currently exist would not achieve the same effect, in the short-term at least.

RP: What you are saying is that there are currently too few OA journals to enable researchers to publish all their papers OA using the Gold Route. By self-archiving, however, they could provide OA to all their work immediately?

SA: Right. Self-archiving allows authors to continue to exercise their freedom to choose which journals they publish in, while also making their papers freely available to everyone on the Web. As Stevan Harnad and others have pointed out, 92% of about 9,000 journals surveyed already allow self archiving, and there are ways by which one can overcome the restrictions imposed by the other 8% of journals.

Self archiving, by the way, has the added benefit of enabling institutions to keep track of the publication output of their faculty and students.

Not an either or question

RP: One of the issues frequently raised when discussing OA publishing is that the researcher (or his funder) is required to pay to publish. As you point out, however, Indian OA journals don't charge author-side fees. Moreover, OA publishers like BioMed Central and Public Library of Science waive their fees in cases of economic hardship. While I take your point about the current shortage of OA journals, the number is growing all the time. I wonder, therefore, if OA publishing might not be a more cost-effective route for Indian research institutes. After all, some financial investment is needed to create and maintain an institutional repository (IR)?

SA: It is not an either or question. Both publishing in OA journals and setting up institutional archives, or repositories, are important for Indian scientists. Moreover, the cost of setting up and maintaining an institutional archive is actually quite low, and certainly affordable for most Indian research institutes and universities.

Certainly if papers by Indian scientists are accepted for publication in high quality OA journals such as PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine, and if the publication charges are waived, it is good. The fact is, however, that not many Indian authors are able to write papers that are accepted by such journals.

RP: So where do Indian researchers publish their scholarly papers today?

SA: Indian research appears in both Indian and foreign journals, roughly in equal proportions. The problem is that most Indian journals have a very poor circulation; for example, only six of the twenty or so journals published by CSIR has a subscriber base of over 1,000 (but less than 1,500). And most Indian papers in foreign journals are in low-impact journals. Indeed, my own bibliometric studies have shown that a very small percentage of Indian papers appear in high impact journals.

The net result is that Indian work does not reach a wide audience, affecting both its visibility and impact, and so the general impression of Indian science is poorer than it deserves. That is why having OA archives is very important for Indian researchers: they can provide much greater visibility.

RP: How would you explain the benefits of Open Access to Indian researchers?

SA: I would point out that by making their research more widely available they can increase its visibility, and thus its impact. Essentially, the appeal of OA for Indian researchers is that they can publish in a full OA journal at no cost to themselves, or to their organisation; or they can publish in any journal and then self archive their papers; and by doing so they can raise their profile within the international research community.

RP: You say that no Indian OA journal charges author-side fees?

SA: That's right.

RP: How then do these journals make ends meet?

SA: Almost all of them charge a subscription for the print version of the journal — which, by the way, is always much lower than the subscription prices of journals produced in the West. Some of them also carry advertisements; and some get grants from the government.

Publishers can also benefit

RP: OK, so they provide free access to the electronic version, but charge for print subscriptions. The situation you describe of no OA publisher charging author-side fees is unique to India is it?

SA: Not necessarily. There may be other countries in which none of their OA journals charge author-side fees. A key factor, perhaps, is that — unlike in the West — journal publishing in India is not dominated by commercial publishers. Many Indian journals are published by government agencies like CSIR, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, and the Indian Council of Medical Research; by academies like the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), and by professional societies like the Indian Chemical Society.

It is worth pointing out that publishers can also benefit from embracing OA, as my friend Dr D K Sahu [CEO of the Bombay-based private company MedKnow Publications] has convincingly shown with the Journal of Postgraduate Medicine (JPGM).

RP: How do you mean?

SA: Within a very short time of going OA, JPGM started attracting far more papers, many from abroad. It also saw a considerable increase in the number of print subscribers, especially from other countries. And the number of citations per paper also increased tremendously.

In fact, JPGM now gets more than a million hits every year, and papers published in it are cited far more often now than a few years ago. Indeed were it to be indexed in Journal Citation Reports, it would be the Indian journal with the highest impact factor!

RP: So what is the current situation with regard to OA publishing in India today?

SA: Currently close to a hundred Indian journals are OA. This includes eleven journals published by the Indian Academy of Sciences, four journals published by INSA, one journal published by the Indian Institute of Science, one journal published by the Indian Council of Medical Research, and three journals published by the Calicut Medical College.

In addition, The National Informatics Centre of the Government of India operates the Indian Medlars Centre, which makes available electronic versions of 38 Indian biomedical journals, mainly published by professional societies. And Indian Journals.com, a Delhi-based company, publishes eight OA journals.

Finally, the commercial publisher MedKnow Publications publishes both print and OA electronic versions of 30 medical journals on behalf of Indian professional societies.

There is, however, a long way to go. While a few CSIR journals were available electronically for a few years (through Bioline), for example, the agreement was not renewed. And today not a single Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) journal is an OA journal.

RP: How do the electronic services offered by Indian publishers compare with those produced by Western publishers and learned societies?

SA:  The quality of the web presence of Indian OA journals varies considerably. The MedKnow journals are among the best, and their web presence is comparable to that of any Western scholarly publisher.

The Indian Academy journals, on the other hand, have considerable scope for improvement. The tragedy is they can really afford it, but for some reason they are not doing it. This inability or indifference to translate what is possible into reality is a problem you encounter in most developing countries.

Much talk and little action

RP: What about the development of Indian institutional repositories?

SA: The Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc) was the pioneer in OA archiving in India. In 1997, for instance, when telecom infrastructure in India was poor, the IMSc set up a mirror site for arXiv.

So far as institutional repositories are concerned, however, there is currently much talk and little action, and in total there are still only about twenty-five institutional archives.

RP: Can you say something about them?

SA: The best known is the GNU EPrints archive at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. It was the first institutional archive to be set up in India, and currently has over 4,175 papers, although not all of them are in full text. Many of the papers are uploaded by the keepers of the archive and not by the authors of the papers.

The National Institute of Technology at Rourkela (NIT-R) has a DSpace repository with over 250 papers, and the Director is talking to the faculty about mandating the deposit of all research papers in the institute's archive.[* Postscript: In the second week of May 2006, the Registrar of NIT-R issued a circular announcing the decision to mandate OA archiving of all the Institute's research papers, as well as doctoral and Masters theses.]

The National Chemical Laboratory also has an archive. It has very few papers but a large number of PhD theses. The Laboratory’s scientists are reluctant to deposit their published research papers in the archive. The Indian Institute of Management at Kozhikode in Kerala also has an archive but, again, author reluctance to archive is rather high.

Overall, Bangalore is emerging as the Indian leader in OA archiving. The Raman Research Institute, founded by Sir C V Raman, has recently set up an omnibus archive, although it has many more press clippings than research papers. The National Aerospace Laboratory, Bangalore, has also set up an omnibus repository. The Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore, too has set up its own archive. And Dr A R D Prasad, an ardent advocate of OA and DSpace, has set up an archive for library and information science — the Librarians’ Digital Library — at the Documentation Research and Training Centre of the Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore.

Finally, the Indian Medlars Centre at NIC, New Delhi, has an EPrints-based archive called OpenMED where biomedical researchers from anywhere in the world can deposit their papers.

All in all, for a country of more than a billion people we have very little to show.

RP: Let me ask you a more fundamental — if somewhat obvious — question. Open Access is essentially an issue of maximising access to research information by removing the financial barriers. But why is it important for Indian researchers in particular to have better access?

SA: There are a number of reasons why Indian researchers need to have better access to scientific information. Many multinationals, for instance, are now not only establishing BPO [Business Process Outsourcing], marketing, and manufacturing operations in India, but R&D centres too.

Likewise, many automobile and pharmaceutical companies are establishing manufacturing facilities in India, and many Indian companies, especially in the IT and pharmaceutical sectors, are acquiring companies abroad.

In addition, laboratories like the Pune-based National Chemical Laboratory earn a substantial portion of their annual investment on R&D from contract research outsourced by overseas companies trying to take advantage of the lower costs of performing research in India.

Indeed, Chemical & Engineering News recently published a special section on India, significantly entitled "Indian Science Rising." As a consequence of all this, the Indian economy is picking up, and the stock market is doing better than ever before: the Sensex recently crossed the unprecedented level of 12,000.

But unless Indian researchers have access to current scientific information the current growth in research and research-based manufacturing will be seriously hampered going forward.

Moreover, Indian science benefits people in other countries as well. When Africa badly needed large supplies of antiretrovirals to combat HIV/AIDS, and was unable to procure them because of prevailing high prices in the West, for instance, an Indian company produced and supplied the drugs at a fraction of the cost.

Consider also that diseases such as avian flu spread so fast across the globe, and natural disasters such as the tsunami of December 2004 affect distant regions within such a short time, that it is vital to have high-level local research capacity to minimise the deleterious consequences. But without access to the scholarly literature it is not possible to develop this local research capacity effectively.

And bear in mind that India is home to the largest incidence of many medical problems, including tuberculosis, diabetes, malaria and blindness, and research done and treatments developed elsewhere sometimes do not help in dealing with these problems because of some locale-specific factors.

Again, therefore, it is important to strengthen indigenous research capacity. The argument that poor countries should concentrate on the basics such as food, shelter, clothing, primary healthcare, and schools, and not invest in research, is faulty.

These are some of the reasons why Indian researchers need better access to the scholarly literature.

Unequal access

RP: In an interview you gave with Die Zeit in 1997 you estimated that India published about 11,000 papers annually in the 3,300 journals indexed in the Science Citation Index, and in total about 16,000 to 20,000 papers a year. Has the situation changed since then?

SA: Not really. If there is any increase it is just marginal. In contrast, China, South Korea and Brazil have recorded a sizeable increase in their journal article output. I have written about this in Current Science. In the recent past, however, the Government of India has increased funding for research, which might help raise the number of papers published.

The fact is that with less than 3% of the world's scientific papers coming from India, and most of them being cited much less often than the world average, India contributes sub-optimally to the creation of new knowledge. The harsh truth is that India cannot emerge as a knowledge power unless her performance in science improves substantially, and quickly.

RP: You said earlier that Indian research institutions cannot afford all the scholarly journals they need. Research institutions in the West make the same complaint. At how much of a disadvantage are Indian research institutes compared to those in the West?

SA: Well it is getting better. A good initiative by the University Grants Commission — InfoNet — has provided many Indian universities with access to around 4,000 journals, a good proportion of them in social sciences.

As another indicator of improvement, it is worth noting that in 2002 the best Indian institution, IISc, had access to only 1,381 print journals, of which 200 were accessible online. Thanks to a government supported consortium called INDEST, today IISc faculty can access 8,950 full-text journals.

The problem, however, is that many universities in the West subscribe to several times that number. Given such unequal access, Indian scientists inevitably struggle to perform world class science.

The fact is that equitable access to current scientific information is essential if India is to take its rightful place in the world.

RP: And since it tends to level the playing field, Open Access can help India to take its rightful place?

SA: Exactly. But we also need to remember that while OA is necessary, it is not sufficient in itself. There are other factors and issues that need to be addressed too.


Part two of this interview is available here.

Interview with Cory Doctorow

Today I am publishing an interview with Cory Doctorow, well-regarded science fiction writer, co-editor of the award-winning blog Boing Boing, and committed and energetic cyber activist.

Doctorow is a Fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and was until recently its European Outreach Coordinator. He is a specialist in copyright and digital rights management (DRM) issues, and will shortly be taking up a Fulbright Visiting Reseach Chair at the University of Southern California's Center on Public Diplomacy
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This is number six of The Basement Interviews, the introduction of which I am publishing on my blog. The full article (including introduction) is available as a downloadable PDF file (see below for details). The interview is being published under a Creative Commons licence.

NextGen Cyber Activist


Cory Doctorow, activist, writer, blogger, public speaker, and self-styled "technology person", speaks to Richard Poynder

Cory Doctorow was born in Toronto in 1971, the son of Trotkyist Jewish émigrés from Eastern Europe. His mother was a teacher and organiser in the woman's movement, his father a computer programmer and one-time professional revolutionary, who later retrained as a teacher too.

As a child, Doctorow attended a series of alternative schools including SEED, the oldest free secondary school in Toronto. His education, therefore, was highly self-directed, and assessed by means of earned credits. One of Doctorow's credits was earned extramurally, "writing in a little white house on top of a mountain" in Mexico.

Doctorow developed an interest in computers at an early age, and wrote his first software program when he was nine years old — a quiz on nuclear disarmament. Science fiction writing was another early interest, and he wrote his first sci-fi story when he was twelve, while touring Europe in the back of the family car.

Although he attended four universities, Doctorow never obtained a degree. Finally dropping out from Ontario's University of Waterloo in 1993, he took a job with a New York-based CD-ROM company called Voyager. Shortly afterwards, however, the bottom fell out of the CD-ROM market, and Doctorow drifted through a series of technology jobs before, in 1999, co-founding the peer-to-peer (P2P) company, OpenCola.

After raising $14 million in funding, and developing several well-received products, OpenCola was poised to become yet another dot.com success. In December 1999, however, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued the popular file-sharing service Napster for copyright infringement, and the world changed for P2P for ever.

As the suit also named Napster's investors — accusing them of contributory infringement and vicarious liability — investor enthusiasm for P2P technology evaporated overnight. What had been viewed as a not-to-be-missed investment opportunity was now a high-risk speculative gamble only for the foolhardy. OpenCola's backers panicked, and took control of the company, eventually selling it to Ontario-based Open Text.

Gradually squeezed out of OpenCola, Doctorow found himself once again looking for a new job. Radicalised by his experience as an entrepreneur, and now located in San Francisco, Doctorow was drawn to cyber rights organisation the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which he joined as a full-time staff member in 2001.

He also began contributing to the blog Boing Boing — which had been founded by the former managing editor of Wired Mark Frauenfelder as a print "zine", but was reinvented as a blog in 2000.

While conceding that his career may appear somewhat haphazard, Doctorow insists that there has always been a common purpose in everything he has done — that of "exploring the social and cultural ramifications of technology." Sometimes, he says, this has been done in a purely theoretical way; sometimes in a practical way.

The theoretical work has primarily been conducted through the medium of science fiction writing: Doctorow sold his first story when he was 17, and published his first novel — a parable about Napster called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom — when he was 31. A further two novels, and a series of short stories, have followed.

These efforts have been well received by the science fiction community: in 2000, Doctorow won the John W Campbell Award for best new writer; in 2003 Down and Out won the Locus Award for best first novel, and his short story 0wnz0red was nominated for the Nebula Award; and in 2004 his short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More won the Sunburst Award for best Canadian science fiction book.

Doctorow's practical work has mainly taken the form of activism. A committed free speech advocate, he believes that the introduction of new laws designed to tame the Internet, combined with the way in which courts are interpreting existing laws in cyberspace, pose a significant threat to civil liberties.

Also convinced that ever more restrictive copyright laws — coupled with increasing use of digital rights management technologies — threaten to erode the public domain, and chill innovation and creativity, Doctorow is a vocal critic of the media companies and politicians driving these developments.

As a writer, Doctorow clearly has a personal stake in these matters. But convinced that there are better ways of encouraging and rewarding creativity in a digital world, he has been keen to experiment with alternative approaches. Consequently, all his works are published under Creative Commons licences, which allow people to download free electronic copies of his works, and to re-distribute and rework them.

And with each new book Doctorow has tended to adopt ever more liberal licensing terms. His third novel — Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town — for instance, was released under a Creative Commons license that also allows people in developing countries to reuse them for commercial purposes

His readers have responded positively: Down and Out has been widely adapted, translated and remixed by third parties. Tim Bennett, for instance, has done a text remix of the book; Mark Forman has serialised it as an audio podcast, adding backing music licensed under Creative Commons; and John Sanchez has translated the novel into Opish, "a children's language comparable to Pig Latin".

More importantly, Doctorow has discovered that liberal licensing can make good business sense. Despite Down and Out being available as a free download, he boasts, "that sucker has blown through five print editions, so I'm not worried that giving away books is hurting my sales."

In other words, Doctorow has demonstrated that providing free electronic copies of creative works is an excellent publicity strategy, and can lead to higher print sales. He also publishes audio extracts of his works as podcasts, which he describes as "a regular feed in which I read from one of my stories for a few minutes at least once a week, from whatever friend's house, airport, hotel, conference, treaty negotiation or what-have-you that I'm currently at."

The point, says Doctorow, is that he is not some "patchouli-scented, fuzzy-headed, 'information wants to be free' info-hippie", but an entrepreneur seeking new business models.

"I believe that we live in an era where anything that can be expressed as bits will be. I believe that bits exist to be copied. Therefore, I believe that any business-model that depends on your bits not being copied is just dumb, and that lawmakers who try to prop these up are like governments that sink fortunes into protecting people who insist on living on the sides of active volcanoes. Me, I'm looking to find ways to use copying to make more money and it's working: enlisting my readers as evangelists for my work and giving them free eBooks to distribute sells more books."

His approach is also informed by a firm belief that the settled world of print will eventually fade away. By experimenting with liberal licences, he says, he hopes to obtain the necessary market intelligence to assist him become "the first writer to figure out what the next writerly business model is."

In short, rather than clinging to industrial-age business models in the way the movie and music industries are so tenaciously doing, Doctorow wants to find the new information-age models that will be needed when people stop buying print books.

And by continuing to contribute to Boing Boing — which he now co-edits with Frauenfelder and California digerati David Pescovitz and Xeni Jardin — he can not only better promote his books, but also support his activism. Today, Boing Boing boasts around 1.7 million unique readers a day, and is the most linked-to blog on the Web.

To further raise his public profile Doctorow also gives constant speeches and talks. He was also recently invited to be a judge for the inaugural Blooker prize — "the world's first literary prize devoted to 'blooks': books based on blogs or websites."

In 2004 Doctorow relocated to London to become EFF's European Outreach Coordinator. When he discovered that his new base was just yards away from London's Speakers Corner — an area in the north-east corner of Hyde Park hallowed by activists of free speech since the middle of the 19th Century — he immediately founded the London Copyfighters' Drunken Brunch and Talking Shop and, with like-minded "copyfighters", took to standing on a traditional soapbox to harangue the British public — and curious tourists — about the threat posed by today's increasingly onerous copyright laws.

Other regular speakers — generally a motley crew of religious zealots, pro-hunting fanatics, and anarchists — were undoubtedly puzzled to be told that the foe is no longer the devil, the red fox, or indeed the state, but powerful corporate interest groups with inscrutable acronyms like MPAA and RIAA, along with their faceless international co-conspirators WIPO and the WTO.

That Speakers Corner — where in the past such luminaries of social and political revolution as Karl Marx, Lenin, and George Orwell have addressed the world — should have become a venue for tirades against copyright is proof indeed that we have truly entered the information age. Class struggle, and disputes over the ownership of the means of production, are giving way to battles over the ownership of intangible things like ideas, information and creative endeavour.

Today, the debate is increasingly being framed not as a problem of toilers of the factory and the field having their labour stolen from them by exploitative capitalists, but one in which knowledge workers are having their ideas and creativity appropriated by rapacious multinational corporations, who then use the copyright system to lock them away for longer and longer periods.

And for consumers the threat is that instead of being able to buy a physical product — like a book or a CD — that they own in perpetuity, they will increasingly be asked to pay each time they want to access it.

In January, Doctorow quit his day job with the EFF to become a full-time writer. As he explained on Boing Boing: "It's something I've dreamed of since I was 12 years old, and now it's a reality."

He remains an EFF Fellow, however, and in April announced that he has accepted a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at the University of Southern California's Center on Public Diplomacy. Starting September, he will spend a year at USC, teaching classes on DRM, and researching a non-fiction book on the topic — to be called Set Top Cop: Hollywood's Secret War on America's Living Rooms.

He also plans to transplant the Copyfighters' Drunken Brunch and Talking Shop to Venice Beach, "substituting Bible-bashers for roller blades."

Although it sells more books, Doctorow's tireless self-promotion has attracted some criticism. Joey Nelson, a 23-year-old denizen of Los Angeles, for instance, has responded by creating the Corysucks web site. This, he jokes, includes a "Cory Sucks Index” — based on an algorithm that measures Doctorow’s self-referential utterances.

"I've read Boing Boing for a long time and only recently realised that I wasn’t really interested in it at all," he explains. "And Cory’s posts are the worst. It seems like everything he writes is either about his DRM crusade, his book signings or Disney. I figured I could write a simple algorithm to quantify how much each post sucked, so I did it."

Self-promotion aside, however, is Doctorow a good novelist? Personally I struggle with his writing, not least because — like most modern science fiction writers — he makes high demands of his readers, expecting them to come to his books with considerable pre-existing knowledge, both of the technology and the tropes of science fiction.

As one reader of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town complained on Amazon.com, "This book is mainly comprised of lots and lots of technobabble, with very little substance. Is that what 'next generation SF' really is? Isn't that kind of pretentious?"

There is, however, no doubt that Doctorow has a considerable facility with language. He has also earned the admiration and respect of the science fiction community. As fellow author Bruce Sterling puts it: "He sparkles! He fizzes! He does backflips and breaks the furniture! Science fiction needs Cory Doctorow!"

More importantly, Doctorow is a talented, highly effective and hugely energetic activist for the free knowledge movement. For that reason, perhaps, we all need Cory Doctorow!


##


I visited Doctorow one sunny May afternoon while he was still working as an EFF staffer in London.

It turned out that there was no EFF office as such: rather Doctorow had acquired squatters' rights in the Stanhope Centre, the London offices of the Freedom Forum.

A spacious, rambling, and shabby Georgian building, the Centre had by the time of my visit been as good as abandoned by the Freedom Forum, and shortly afterwards the lease on the building expired — providing Doctorow with the final stimulus to become a full-time writer perhaps.

In any case, it was clear that Doctorow spent much of his time in London rattling around in a warren of deserted and dilapidated rooms containing little bar a collection of ancient office equipment and broken furniture.

He arrived ten minutes late, having been delayed on the London Underground. "Everybody else hates the underground," he says. "I love the underground."

With thick horn-rimmed glasses and a buzz cut haircut, Doctorow looks — appropriately enough — an amalgam of nerd, sci-fi writer and EFF wonk. While dressed in the regulation nerd uniform of T-shirt and jeans, for instance, his designer stubble transmits a slightly different message. And when the interview starts it is instantly apparent that Doctorow is considerably more articulate than the average coder, and has a far greater interest in, and understanding of, "state-of-the-nation" issues than any hacker I have ever encountered.

He shows me into a large room with a row of computers along the front wall and a meeting table in the middle. Inviting me to sit down, he immediately turns his back to me, and spends the first five minutes of the interview copying data from his laptop to a grubby-looking PC.

Backing up, it seems, is a Doctorow obsession. As he explained in an interview with SF Gate in 2003, he is "pretty paranoid" about losing data. So he backs up whenever he can, and uses at least two backup computers. Once a month he also encrypts everything, and copies it across to a remote server in Toronto. In addition, he backs up his e-mail on an iPod at the end of every day.

As he busies himself with his task I glance around the room. The soulless urban decay and creaking technology seem ready made as a backdrop for a cyberpunk novel, conveying just the right amount of futuristic gloom.

Judging by the noise, all the dust in the room has over time been sucked into the fans of the serried ranks of ancient computers, which groan irritably. In one corner lie the remnants of what Doctorow humorously refers to as "the dead chair" — its legs snapped off; its back broken beyond repair.

In the opposite corner a dying yucca reaches half-heartedly towards the pale light filtering through the dirty window. The listlessness of its desiccated and yellowing leaves suggest that even were some sympathetic visitor to break open the window and thrust its dying corpse into the sunshine the consequent flood of oxygen would only put it out of its misery all the sooner. The row of dead flies on the windowsill, feet pointed skywards, clearly gave up all hope long ago.

Backup finished, Doctorow turns towards me. As we talk, we sip mineral water from soiled glasses, layered with the fingerprints of previous visitors. Doctorow makes slow semaphore signals with his hands to punctuate his sentences. Occasionally he hunches over and, with a few deft movements of his fingers, conjures up carefully designed paper cranes — a habit acquired, he explains, when he gave up smoking.

On the PC behind him a succession of screensavers come and go: a picture of a wrecked London telephone box is replaced by one of the Statue of Liberty; President Bush appears briefly as a vampire, before giving way to a picture of a pizza; in its turn the pizza disappears, pushed aside by a slogan reading "Jews for Jesus." The telephone box returns, and the cycle repeats.

During the interview I find myself contrasting Doctorow's views with those I heard in my earlier meetings with Michael Hart, Richard Stallman and Lawrence Lessig: the same picture of corporate greed, legal shenanigans, and diminishing public good — set against a backdrop of rapid technological change and cyber activism — only serves to reinforce my sense of having somehow stumbled into a scene in a sci-fi story.

What is different this time, however, is the international perspective Doctorow brings to the debate, along with his more astute political understanding of the situation. His views on how wealthy corporate suits and irresponsible politicians are conspiring with organisations like WIPO and the WTO to engineer at an international level legislative change that would be unacceptable on the national stage are particularly illuminating.

His more sophisticated perspective is surely a consequence of the highly politicised home he was brought up in. No doubt he has also benefited from the acquired wisdom of being a second-generation activist, having learned from the mistakes of his elders — many of whom remain politically naïve, and apparently incapable of understanding the international context in which their activism needs to be rooted.

As a staffer with the EFF, Doctorow has also developed a keen sense of the complex free speech issues raised by cyberspace. As he talks I struggle at times to follow his reasoning. For while we Europeans claim to value and protect free speech we are not generally accustomed to thinking the issues through in any depth.

It is only when I ask Doctorow about open spectrum that the picture begins to clear. If governments were to deregulate the wireless spectrum, he says, we could end up in a world where "the incremental cost of sending a packet [of information] from anywhere to anywhere else is zero. If that happens we end up with a lot more free speech — which is great."

I realise that what he is saying is that the more people are able to communicate with one another (the more "speech" there is), the greater the number and variety of viewpoints available. Not only is this inherently more democratic, but the more viewpoints we have access to, the greater our understanding of an issue becomes.

I recall that this is a point made nearly 150 years ago by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, who asserted that "the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind."

The implication of this, of course, is that true understanding is as likely to come from the babble of voices rising from the crowd, as it is from the lone voice of the wise man. The implication of what Doctorow says, therefore, is that the more people who contribute to this babble, the deeper our comprehension of a topic is likely to be. Re-phrased, it could be Eric Raymond saying, "given enough tongues, all misunderstandings are shallow."

Moreover, like Lessig, Doctorow believes that this same principle applies to creativity and innovation — which does not generally take place in a vacuum, but develops in direct proportion to the richness and variety of pre-existing ideas and creativity. As such, creativity is a process that Lessig likes to describe as “rip, mix and burn”; or as Doctorow prefers to put it, "mining the culture."

So while the Internet has undoubtedly become a conduit for a growing tide of empty-headed noise and scurrilous chatter, it is also a near frictionless channel for the free flow of creative ideas. As such, it holds out the promise of a blossoming of new ideas, new opinions and creative expression. The more oysters there are, the greater the number of pearls.

For Doctorow, as for Lessig, therefore, the danger is that if we allow censorship, over-restrictive copyright, and DRM-imposed access restrictions to obstruct the flow of creativity this enables, we risk impoverishing both human understanding and expression.

The key point, perhaps, is not that information on the Internet wants to be free (as in free speech), but that it now can be free, and in ways not previously possible. Advocates of the free knowledge movement, therefore, are surely right to insist that those seeking to impose unnecessary restrictions on the Web must not prevail.

Indeed, to hobble the Internet is not just to pass up the opportunity of a huge new flowering of knowledge and creativity but — due to the collateral damage that over-regulation can cause — we risk plunging ourselves into a new dark age, where innovation, ingenuity and artistic expression dry up.

Suddenly Doctorow's phone bursts into noisy and garish life: a medley of flashing lights illuminates the screen, the phone vibrates on the desk and — in place of a regular ring tone — the voice of a disembodied Walt Disney character fills the room: "Oh, what a cute little pink bunny."

Doctorow hits the busy button. A few minutes later, however, the phone again bursts into intemperate life. It's his girlfriend trying to track him down, Doctorow tells me, adding, as if in explanation, "She's Welsh".

It's clearly time for me to go, so I say my farewells and depart.


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If you wish to read this interview in its entirety please click on the link below. I am publishing it under a Creative Commons licence, so you are free to copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you credit me as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use it for any commercial purpose.

If after reading it you feel it is well done you might like to consider making a small contribution to my PayPal account. I have in mind a figure of $8, but whatever anyone felt inspired to contribute would be fine by me. Payment can be made quite simply by quoting the e-mail account: aotg20@dsl.pipex.com. It is not necessary to have a PayPal account to make a payment.

What I would ask is that if you point anyone else to the article then you consider directing them to this post, rather than directly to the PDF file itself.

If you would like to republish the article on a commercial basis, or have any comments on it, please email me at richard.poynder@journalist.co.uk.

I would like to acknowledge the help of the Open Society Institute, which provided a small upfront grant to enable me to get started on The Basement Interviews project. Further information about The Basement Interviews can be found at the Open and Shut? site.

To read the interview in its entirety (as a PDF file) click here.

Interview with Lawrence Lessig

Today I am publishing an interview with Lawrence Lessig, professor of Law at Stanford Law School, founder of Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, co-founder of Creative Commons, board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and de facto leader of the Free Culture Movement.

Lessig has authored a number of seminal books, including Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, and Free Culture.

Amongst other things Lessig was (briefly) Special Master in the Microsoft antitrust trial (United States v Microsoft), and lead counsel for the plaintiff in Eldred v Ashcroft, a case heard before the Supreme Court of the United States that challenged the constitutionality of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA).

This is number five of The Basement Interviews, the introduction of which I am publishing on my blog. The full article (including introduction) is available as a downloadable PDF file (see below for details). The interview is being published under a Creative Commons licence.

Free Culture

Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School, and leader of the Free Culture Movement, speaks to Richard Poynder

Lawrence Lessig was born in South Dakota in 1961. Two years later his family moved to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where his father, Jack Lessig, started a steel-fabricating business that was ultimately to employ around 150 people.

Lessig, his father explained to the Los Angles Times in 2002, was a very bright and able child. He was also decisive, and never seemed to fail in anything. Moreover, whatever he got into — be it starting a newspaper in the fourth grade or running a Jerry Lewis-style telethon — he became the leader. He was, added his father, "always about four or five steps ahead of everyone."

Fascinated by the question of "how things ought to be", Lessig was soon drawn to politics, becoming president of the Pennsylvania Teenage Republicans, and running the campaign for a would-be state senator. He was also the youngest member of Pennsylvania's delegation at the Republican Convention that nominated Ronald Reagan in 1980. "I grew up", he explained to Steven Levy in a 2002 Wired feature "a right-wing lunatic Republican."

Having enrolled to study economics and management at the University of Pennsylvania, Lessig rapidly concluded that business studies were really rather dull. He did, however, enjoy the history of economics. This led to an interest in philosophy, and after graduating from Penn in 1983 he decamped to Cambridge, England, to take an MA in philosophy. During the 1980s he also travelled extensively in Eastern Europe.

Lessig's sojourn abroad was to lead to his political transformation. What he calls the "thin conception of libertarianism" with which he left America proved inadequate when placed under the microscope of philosophical enquiry in Cambridge. It fared no better when his views on his home country, and its history, were juxtaposed with the very different "characterisations" he discovered in Eastern Europe. He eventually had to conclude that these other characterisations "were closer to the truth than my own understanding." As a result, he says, a "channel of scepticism" opened up in his head.

On his return to the US, Lessig toyed with the idea of becoming a philosophy professor. Concluding, however, that it was "too removed from anything real" he turned to the law, studying first at Harvard and then at Yale. The law appealed to him, he explains, because it seemed to offer a remedy, and a defence, against power rights — not least the power rights he saw dominating American politics. Indeed, by now he had come to feel a "kind of disgust" with politics. For this reason, no doubt, he chose to specialise in constitutional law.

Between 1989 and 1991 Lessig served as a law clerk, first to Judge Richard Posner of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and then to Justice Antonin Scalia of the US Supreme Court. Since both justices are conservatives the newly-sceptical Lessig found himself frequently at variance with them on points of law.

Nevertheless, he says, he gained a "deep respect" for Posner — a respect that the justice clearly reciprocates. Commenting to the Los Angeles Times in 2002, Posner described Lessig as "like Ralph Nader, but brighter."

Lessig's academic career began in 1991, when he was appointed assistant professor of law in the Chicago Law School. It was not until 1993, however, that his attention was drawn to cyberspace. This came after he experienced an epiphany while reading an article in The Village Voice about a virtual rape. Coming across it shortly after reading Catharine MacKinnon's book Only Words, Lessig was struck that the author, Julian Dibbell, had been able to publish something in The Village Voice that — had it been written by MacKinnon — would have been rejected by the newspaper as contrary to First Amendment values.

Lessig concluded that cyberspace provided an ideal environment for exploring issues in a politically neutral way. As he puts it, "It was a moment to think: 'Wow, I could talk about the issues without people knowing the politics, and therefore get them to think about them originally.'"

In 1995, therefore, Lessig began teaching one of the first courses on the "Laws of cyberspace", and in 1997 he moved to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

Having gained a reputation as a guru in the many legal conundrums posed by a world increasingly dominated by networks and computers, in 1997 Lessig was appointed "Special Master" in the Microsoft antitrust trial. Microsoft had been charged with monopoly behaviour after merging its web browser into the Windows operating system.

Lessig's task was to conduct hearings, take additional evidence, and issue a recommendation to the court — a job that he threw himself into with huge energy and enthusiasm.

Microsoft, however, was less enthusiastic, and within two months had persuaded a federal appeals court to have Lessig removed from the case. This was a great disappointment for Lessig: speaking to Levy four years later he said sadly: "Getting the appointment was a charmed thing. But I missed the chance to write the report."

The experience, however, contributed greatly to Lessig's thinking about the implications of living in a computer-mediated world. In particular, he had become fascinated by the way that software code shapes our experience in cyberspace. His concern was, however, that in doing so it was capable of restricting our freedoms. He was also convinced that the original Internet architects were too naïve to appreciate the threat — a naivety summed up by John Gilmore's much-quoted saying: "The Net treats censorship as damage and routes around it."

For Lessig there is no such thing as "the Net". Rather there is just a "a bunch of people who write code to define the Net." Consequently, the code could at any time be re-written to remove the freedoms that had been designed into it. In 1999, therefore, Lessig published Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. His aim was to warn people that as the Internet developed so its freedoms would come under threat, both from commercial interests and from governments intent on controlling their citizens.

In 2001 he expanded on his theme in his second book, The Future of Ideas. Examining the various layers of the Internet's architecture Lessig set out to demonstrate how each one was in danger of being re-engineered to meet the proprietary interests of commerce, or the desire of governments to monitor and deter illicit behaviour — at the cost of freedoms like the right to anonymity, freedom of speech, and the freedom to innovate. As he put it: "How a system is designed will affect the freedoms and control the system enables."

Above all, he argued, it was the Internet's end-to-end (e2e) principle — in which a dumb network merely passes traffic between intelligent computers connected to it — that is responsible for these freedoms. The threat to e2e was that the network could be appropriated by commercial organisations (e.g. Hollywood studios, record labels, and cable operators) who would then cordon off chunks of the born-open data network in order to bolster their proprietary interests.

As his thinking developed Lessig's focus began to shift from the network itself, to the content that flowed through it. His concern was that, rather than exploiting the new opportunities of the online world, large media companies were seeking to restrict access to their content, in a desire to preserve their increasingly outdated business models.

How were they doing this? First, they were starting to lock content up with digital rights management (DRM) technology. While this could be justified on the grounds that it allows copyright holders to protect their legitimate interests, Lessig feared that, if only because of the nature of DRM, this would be done at the expense of consumers — not least the erosion of their traditional "fair use" rights.

Second, they were successfully lobbying governments to introduce new legislation that not only sanctioned the use of DRM, but outlawed its circumvention, even when this was done in order to exercise fair use rights, or to engage in free speech. In 1998, for instance, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) had made the act of circumventing DRM a criminal offence.

Lobbying was also leading to substantial changes to intellectual property laws. Copyright, for instance, had reached the point where it now regulated a far greater range of activities and, due to continuing extensions to the term of copyright, looked set to become an almost limitless monopoly right, seriously diminishing the public domain as a result.

Lessig concluded that these changes represented a threat not only to our online freedoms, but to our offline freedoms as well. This was the theme of his third book, Free Culture, published in 2004. As he explains, "Free Culture is about how a reaction to the network could threaten values off the network. This was a reaction primarily driven by the content industry, which was concerned about copyright infringement on the network."

In short, in the process of seeking to preserve the old order (and their out-dated business models), content companies were also enlarging their realm, and their power. As a consequence, the traditional balance between the rights of copyright holders and the rights of consumers was being tilted away from consumers. Moreover, due to continuing media consolidation, more and more culture was becoming the exclusive property of a few large corporations.

As Lessig puts it, "never before in the history of free society has a fewer number of people exercised more legal control of the development and spread of culture."

Since creativity cannot take place in a vacuum, the erosion of the public domain consequent upon the changes in copyright law also threatened to stultify creativity, and impact negatively on cultural innovation. Creativity, after all, relies on being able to borrow from the past, and from other creators — in a process Lessig characterises as "rip, mix and burn".

In addition, Lessig had concluded that the increasing privatisation of culture, coupled with growing use of DRM, now posed a significant threat to free speech.

As well as teaching and writing about these dangers, therefore, in 1999 Lessig decided to do something proactive. Specifically, he spearheaded a legal challenge to the controversial 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), which had extended copyright by an additional 20 years. Since it had done so retrospectively, it had also frozen the flow of content into the public domain, at least until 2019.

The first constitutional challenge to copyright limits to reach the US Supreme Court, Eldred v Ashcroft (as the case became) was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Lessig to stem the growing privatisation of culture that he had come to deplore.

In arguing the case, Lessig claimed that by effectively making copyright a perpetual right, the CTEA had violated the requirements of the Constitution's Copyright Clause, which specified that copyright should be a time-limited monopoly.

He also argued that copyright law should be subject to scrutiny under the First Amendment, with the aim of ensuring a balance was maintained between freedom of speech and the rights of copyright holders. This, he argued, the CTEA had failed to do. To Lessig's great disappointment, however, in January 2003 the Supreme Court upheld the CTEA.

Undaunted, Lessig concluded that in making its judgement the Supreme Court had, by implication, conceded that copyright law should be subject to First Amendment scrutiny — if it affected the "traditional contours" of copyright.

In March 2004, therefore, he launched a new legal challenge (Kahle v Gonzales), asking a US district court to declare as unconstitutional — when considered collectively — the Copyright Act of 1976, the CTEA and various other changes to the copyright law.

Essentially, Kahle v Gonzales raises the claim that by removing the need for creators to register and renew their works, Congress has indeed changed the contours of copyright, transforming it from a conditional to an unconditional system.

Until the 1976 Act, for instance, copyright protection in the US was only available to those who took affirmative steps to claim it — by registering their copyright, marking copies of their work with a copyright notice, and renewing it after a relatively short initial period of protection.

With these "registration formalities" removed, copyright automatically comes into existence at the moment of creation. Consequently, all forms of expression are now subject to copyright protection, generally for at least 150 years, regardless of whether the creators even want copyright,

The US Government responded by seeking a motion to dismiss Kahle v Gonzales, arguing that the case was little more than a vain attempt to re-litigate Eldred v Ashcroft. To this, Lessig counters that since the changes to copyright law have transformed it from an opt-in to an opt-out system the case makes a very different point.

In December 2004, however, the US District Court, Northern District of California, did indeed dismiss Kahle v Gonzales. Unprepared to give up, Lessig and his fellow litigators responded by appealing the case to the Ninth Circuit. For the moment, therefore, the outcome remains unknown.

By now, Lessig had also opened a third front in the free culture wars: Having relocated to Stanford Law School in 2000, he shortly thereafter (in 2001) co-founded Creative Commons.

A San Francisco-based non-profit organisation committed to expanding the range of creative work available for others to legally build upon and share, Creative Commons provides alternative licensing and contract schemes to allow creators to waive some of the rights that copyright automatically assigns to them.

In effect, Creative Commons has taken the battle to the streets — by encouraging creators to reject the "all rights reserved" approach of traditional copyright, in favour of a "some rights reserved" model. The logic is that even if the copyright regime automatically grants excessive monopoly rights to creators, there is nothing to stop them from unilaterally waiving some or all of those rights.

Lessig's work on Creative Commons, coupled with his writing and his litigation, has made him the de facto leader of the "Free Culture Movement". Being a modest man, however, he is keen to share the credit. The ideas expounded in Free Culture, he insists, are "'merely' derivative", since they are heavily based on the ideas of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Movement.

This is undoubtedly the case: Creative Commons licences owe a great debt both to Stallman's general notion of copyleft, and to the specific model he created with the General Public Licence.

Stallman, however, is less generous. Expressing disappointment with the book Free Culture, he describes Lessig's views as being "less ethically firm" than his. He has also asked Lessig to withdraw two Creative Commons licences, on the grounds that they do not give people the right "to distribute verbatim copies non-commercially".

What is the central point of difference between Stallman and Lessig? Stallman insists that people should have a fundamental right to copy creative works. Lessig, however, argues that the appropriate freedoms and rights must always be contingent on the specific circumstances of a situation — a reality reflected in the growing variety of different Creative Commons licences.

In some cases, for instance, the right to copy is actually superfluous, he says. Thus for an African child who speaks no English, having the right to copy an English-language textbook is worthless. What is far more valuable in such circumstances, Lessig argues, is the right to create a derivative work — in other words, to have the book translated.

Stallman is not the only critic of Lessig and the Creative Commons. In 2005, for instance, Debian software programmer Benjamin Mako Hill published an essay complaining that Creative Commons "sets no defined limits and promises no freedoms, no rights, and no fixed qualities."

This, responds Lessig, is simply not true. Instead of carping, he adds, critics should show "a little bit of humility", and listen to what creators and consumers say is important. "Rather than marching in with a set of defined principles that come from who knows where, and imposing those regardless of the views of those who live in that particular domain, they should listen to what these people say to them."

What such disagreements surely demonstrate is that the wider free knowledge movement looks set to become more diffuse and more complex as it develops.

What is notable about the current debate is that where the disagreement between Open Source and Free Software advocates is expressed in terms of pragmatism versus ethics, both sides in the Free Culture debate take an ethical position, but disagree on the specific ethics and values that ought to be promoted.

What is perhaps most significant about the Free Culture Movement is that it has transformed a discussion that was primarily focused on specific types of information and knowledge (be it digitised books, software code, or news reports), into a more wide-ranging debate about culture, and how it is produced. In doing so, it has underscored the importance of collaboration in cultural production, and the dangers inherent in restricting that collaboration, not least by overly restrictive intellectual property laws.

In short, by getting us to think about the issue in terms of culture, Lessig has reminded us that in some areas of human activity too great an emphasis on private ownership impoverishes everyone. After all, if culture is impoverished, we are all impoverished — in a kind of reverse "Tragedy of the Commons."

Seen from this perspective, copyright (and intellectual property generally) ceases to be an esoteric lawyerly preoccupation, and becomes a central part of a more wide-ranging debate about the future health and vitality of our collective endeavours in the digital, networked world.

Since this new world enables far greater collaboration it inevitably requires greater openness. Moreover, by seeking to cling to traditional closed models we are in danger not only of eroding freedoms we have long taken for granted, but of stultifying cultural innovation too.

It is important to stress, however, that this does not mean that copyright and intellectual property have no role in the new world — although its role may need to change. As Lessig points out, it's simply a question of balance.

The problem right now is the balance has gone seriously awry, and if we don’t head the danger signs it will become even more skewed.



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Lawrence Lessig is a very busy man, so getting to speak to him proved challenging. I eventually succeeded by booking his time several months in advance, and splitting the interview into two telephone calls. This included a call to his office in Stanford, where I managed to stretch a half-hour slot into a 75-minute conversation, and a call to the Grand Hotel in Oslo — where he was staying for one of the many events he attends to promote free culture.

Built in 1874, the Grand Hotel seemed a fitting venue for a man Steven Levy has dubbed the Elvis of Cyberlaw: over the years it has attracted heads of state, Nobel Peace Prize winners, and other high-profile personages like playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Roald Amundsen (who visited the hotel in 1912 on his return from a successful expedition to the South Pole).

As a sign of the pressured life Lessig leads — or a demonstration perhaps of the dangers inherent in visiting a northern European city when you are accustomed to the temperate climate of the West Coast of America — Lessig had succumbed to a cold virus by the time I caught up with him in Oslo. As a consequence, our conversation was regularly interrupted by his coughs and sneezes.

I was also intrigued when later listening to the tape of our conversation to detect the sound of a child in the background. Was Lessig multi-tasking: engaged simultaneously in the itinerant care of his 18-month old son, while being interviewed by a journalist? Or had our ether-borne voices become somehow mingled with another conversation, in another town, possibly in another continent? Whatever the explanation, it seemed an appropriate reminder of the vagaries and ambiguities of virtual encounters.

Certainly I was disappointed not to meet the Elvis of Cyberlaw in the flesh — if only to be able to compare my impressions with those of others'. What I did know — if only from glancing at Lessig's picture on his blog — is that he has a suitably professorial cranium, a characteristic that sees him invariably cast as the archetypal egghead. Referring to Lessig's "startlingly high forehead" in his Wired article, for instance, Levy commented: "it's almost as if, in an attempt to accommodate his brain, the top of his head was pulled up a couple of inches, like an image stretched by Kai's Power Tools."

Indeed, one is tempted to conclude that Lessig may be little over-intellectual — a characteristic that could explain his occasional naivety or, let's call it, impracticality.

When preparing the argument for the Eldred v Ashcroft case, for instance, Lessig's fellow litigators repeatedly insisted that the case would only be won if they were able to demonstrate to the Supreme Court that "dramatic harm were being done to free speech and free culture". Lessig, however, ignored this advice. As he put it in his subsequent mea culpa, "as a law professor, I had spent my life teaching my students that this court does the right thing, not because of politics but because it is right." For that reason, he added, "I was not persuaded that we had to sell our case like soap."

After losing the case, however, he had to concede that he had "failed to recognise that however much I might hate a system in which the court gets to pick the constitutional values that it will respect, that is the system we have."

Equally striking was his confession, in late 2005, [after this interview was conducted] that he had only just realised that the rapidly expanding set of free licences was not always compatible. This, he added, meant that, for legal reasons, content released under one free licence cannot always be combined with content licensed under another free licence.

This "embarrassing" oversight, he admitted, meant that the very tools designed to promote it were subverting a primary aim of the Free Culture Movement. As he conceded, "All of these licenses were written without regard to the fundamental value of every significant advance in the digital age — interoperability."

In his Wired article Levy described Lessig as a "private, even shy, person" who before an audience suddenly becomes electric. Certainly I detected a striking contrast between his answers to personal questions, and those concerning his ideas.

In the former case he replied so briefly, and so quietly, that I was not always sure that he had indeed responded — a characteristic that played havoc with my voice-activated tape recorder, which repeatedly switched itself off at inappropriate moments, leaving me with a somewhat disjointed transcript. When Lessig felt able to take flight with an interesting idea, however, his voice became animated, full, and clear.

Nevertheless, in reviewing the tape I was left with a somewhat hazy understanding of Lessig's politics. How precisely, I wondered, did the right-wing libertarianism of his childhood differ from the "matured libertarianism" he professes today? Such distinctions were either too subtle, or too foreign, for my European sensibilities.

What is not in doubt is that Lessig is widely viewed as a liberal, and he supports a host of "right-on" causes. He is also prepared to walk the talk — in 1985, for instance, he smuggled a heart valve for a Jewish dissident into the Soviet Union, hiding it in the crutch of his pants.

He is clearly also committed to the sharing principles espoused by the Free Culture Movement. A new version of his book Code, for instance, is being produced as "an online, collaborative book update" on a Wiki. The aim is to draw upon "the creativity and knowledge of the community." In addition, Lessig has indicated that the royalties from the book will be donated to Creative Commons.

In 1999 Lessig married the German-born human-rights lawyer Bettina Neuefeind — who investigated Kosovo war crimes, and now supports homeless people in San Francisco.

Interestingly, Lesig's natal family are also German in origin. Arriving in North America as Hessian mercenaries during the American Revolutionary War, Lessig's forebears were hired by the British to fight the rebels.

For Lessig — whom many now view as the Commander-in-Chief of the war for independence in Cyberspace — it is a strikingly apposite lineage except that, unlike his ancestors, he has chosen to fight on the side of the rebels, not the ancien régime


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If you wish to read this interview in its entirety please click on the link below. I am publishing it under a Creative Commons licence, so you are free to copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you credit me as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use it for any commercial purpose.

If after reading it you feel it is well done you might like to consider making a small contribution to my PayPal account. I have in mind a figure of $8, but whatever anyone felt inspired to contribute would be fine by me. Payment can be made quite simply by quoting the e-mail account: aotg20@dsl.pipex.com. It is not necessary to have a PayPal account to make a payment.

What I would ask is that if you point anyone else to the article then you consider directing them to this post, rather than directly to the PDF file itself.

If you would like to republish the article on a commercial basis, or have any comments on it, please email me at richard.poynder@journalist.co.uk.

I would like to acknowledge the help of the Open Society Institute, which provided a small upfront grant to enable me to get started on The Basement Interviews project. Further information about The Basement Interviews can be found at the Open and Shut? site.

To read the interview in its entirety (as a PDF file) click here.