©ollectanea

I have just returned from a nice 2 week stay in France where I conducted a little research on the French attitude towards the future of libraries in a networked world. In light of the scathing book Jean-Noel Jeanneney, President of the Bibliotheque Nationale, had written earlier (Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge) criticizing American digitization efforts spearheaded by Google, I wasn't all that sure what I would find. But, I've concluded that the bell curve obtains in France just as it does here in the USA (the long tail doesn't describe everything). French libraries are all over the map with respect to their attitudes towards and adoption of strategies to define their futures.

While I was there, Google announced its first francophone (french-speaking) library partner, the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). In commentary on the French blog, "Under the Duster," it was noted that the Swiss had not spent a cent to digitize their patrimony: Google numerise en Suisse romande - Sous la poussiere. I have no basis to judge the accuracy of such a statement, but it does not surprise me. The effort to digitize cultural history is overwhelmingly huge. It requires support from every sector. It can't be accomplished by governments alone. It can't be accomplished by libraries alone. It can't be accomplished by Google alone. It hasn't taken very long for us to figure this out. I think it's time for us to move beyond critiques of those who are making the effort and start to think about things further down the road, as Don Waters suggested in a recent essay about strategic thinking regarding our efforts to facilitate open access to scholarship. The availability of long-forgotten books online, or at a minimum, the availability of information about them and where they can be obtained, is a dramatic change and we need to start thinking about the implications of this and how to best take advantage of it.

Finally, it's important to note that the European Book Search partners have limited their participation to books in the public domain. This is not a surprise -- no other country in the world has a fair use provision like ours, or, therefore, an opportunity to argue the merits of mass digitization for books still in copyright as a fair use. We are on our own here, completely. Very American.

Print is Dead has a nice piece focusing on how much has changed in the music industry by comparing the release 40 years ago of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band with Paul McCartney's latest release: Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age -- It's Getting Better All the Time: Paul McCartney's new record. It is a very upbeat piece, though it ends with a little admonition to the publishing industry not to sit idly by and wait for the ax to fall.

I have believed for quite some time now that the problem with copyright and creative culture wasn't really a legal problem, but rather a business model problem, and this continues to be a year where the business solutions are finally making me think that maybe I was right... Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age ｻ Tatooine Freezes Over: Lucas to authorize mash-ups. Just a little bit of encouragement, that's all it takes.

I don't often lose sleep over copyright issues anymore. But last night I could not stop thinking about the Copyright Office's new resource for *children.* Please have a look if you haven't already: Taking the Mystery Out of Copyright. There's a text only version if you want to skip the cartoons and the music (assuming you are not 13). This bothers me on so many levels, but I'm only going to address one level here, the most obvious. My experienced, calm, collected voice is telling me to wait a few days before I write this. Ok, at least wait a few days before I publish it. Clearly, I am ignoring that voice. I should at least acknowledge that I'm probably overreacting. I no doubt will feel differently about it after I have thought about it for awhile. Maybe I'll write about it again after a few days.

That said, do children really need to know about copyright? Well, I reluctantly must admit that yes, they do. Should they need to know about copyright registration, copyright history, and the role copyright plays in protecting film, music, art and literature? Well, it's not like they need to be protected from this, like it was senseless death, war violence or something cruel and ugly. So, it is commendable that the Library of Congress offers a well-done, straightforward, and fairly neutral informational piece. What would we expect the Library to talk about, other than what it does, which is, in this case, copyright registration. A narrow slice of the copyright pie, to be sure, but again, that's one of the things the Library does that no one else does.

But on the other hand, remember what it was like to be 13? Was registering your copyrights something you were all that concerned about? Should you have been? Have things changed that much with respect to how likely it is that the metaphorical box of things you created during your 13th or 14th year of life needs protection? From what? From becoming part of the stream of creativity (my metaphors are all over the place) from which you yourself borrowed to create?

If I had one opportunity to tell kids about copyright, I suppose I would mention its role in protecting the commercial interests of creators and distributors like the film, music, art and publishing industries, but in the next breath I would appeal to their own sense of how most things we all create are not meant for commercial exploitation, but instead are meant to be shared, reused, remixed and borrowed from. I'd say, "Look inside that box of things you created last year. Let's look at where all your things came from. Let's see how borrowing and modifying and adding your own ideas works in real life, and what we all need to keep that going."

The lesson I would teach is about the fact that *YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING* if you want your own creativity to be added to and be a part of a flowing, lively stream, rather than be caught up in a little eddy that goes nowhere. Congress (something here about infinite wisdom) has created a set of rules that, without your doing anything beyond the mere act of creating (tangible things, of course), keeps everything you create in that box, locked away, maybe forever, but at least for, let's see, you're 13? Let's say you'll live to 78, your box of stuff stays locked away for the rest of your life (65 years) plus 70 more years. Yes, in 135 years your box of stuff will possibly join the stream of creativity. If the box is still around then. And somebody finds it. And they know you and only you created it, and when you died. And they know about copyrights. If that doesn't fit your idea of what you want, then YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING. You have to let people know that you have something else in mind for your box of stuff. Fade to Creative Commons logo/website.

The assumption that everything needs "protection" for 1 1/3 centuries is so out of step with the reality of how we all create and most importantly, *why* we all create (overwhelming, not to make a living from our creations), and the serious consequences of being out of step with reality makes me very sad, and angry. The waste, the untapped creativity, and the criminalizing of creativity cannot be defended in my opinion. One size does not fit all. Given the enormity of the explosion of creativity enabled by the networked environment, to say nothing of creativity in the real world, the lessons we need to teach are about taking responsibility to do individually what Congress cannot seem to do for us as a nation -- create a copyright that fits our widely divergent needs, rather than one that both stifles us creatively and turns us into criminals (or potential civil litigants -- there's another interesting copyright lesson for kids) if we ignore it. We need to tag our creative works with simple statements that express how we feel about their place in the creative stream. I would recommend Creative Commons licenses for many reasons, but any statement about sharing is better than doing nothing and thereby consigning your work to copyright's centuries-long holding bin, or perhaps appropriately named, wastebasket.

Lawrence Lessig has formally announced his decision to turn his attention to new pursuits: Lawrence Lessig: Required Reading: the next 10 years. Of course those of us who have looked to him for guidance and inspiration are sad to lose his incredible mind, his voice and his energy in the effort to bring copyright's plight to the attention of a broader audience. It is no doubt due in some part to copyright's relative obscurity that things have gotten as out of balance as they now are. And he's right: he has accomplished miraculous things. Whether others will pick up the mantle and be as effective as he was, or perhaps even more effective, only time will tell.

But I for one applaud his measured determination to address himself to new challenges. He said, "I had learned everything I was going to learn about the issues I've been working on ..." There seem to be people who can devote themselves with unflagging energy to the same thing for a lifetime. And then there are others who just can't do that. Are we really made of different cloth in this regard? It's an interesting question, but for those who feel a need, after awhile, to do something new just because it's new, it's almost like a survival imperative. You start to fall apart, mentally, if your brain activity keeps going down the same paths for too long.

Learning new things is one of the greatest joys of life, maybe the greatest joy. We all do it at some level I suppose. Lawrence Lessig is doing it at a very high level. He talked about becoming a beginning again. Zen celebrates the beginner's mind, but once one is as accomplished as Lessig, being a beginner again takes courage. He has always shown himself to have no shortage of that virtue, however.

I loved his references to Al Gore as an inspiration, but in a way, by contrast, Lessig might be saying that Al Gore gave up on the very task that he (Lessig) plans to tackle. Gore seems to have concluded that it is not just difficult, but *impossible* to make some things happen within government, and one might include among the impossibilities, changing that fact itself. Or maybe it's just that Gore felt that in a given amount of time, he was more likely to accomplish what needed to be done with regard to environmental responsibility than what needed to be done to make government more responsive to the public good than it is to moneyed interests on this issue (or any other issue for that matter).

In any event, I wish Lessig unbounded success in his new undertakings. It will make a marvelous story some day, to tell those who never knew him of his life, the times in which he lived, and the things he accomplished. Somebody better get started writing it!

Are you anticipating the launch of the iPhone in two days? Are you at this moment in a line to buy one? You could be. You probably aren't. But if things go even a little bit like everyone is predicting they will, the iPhone will change your life whether you have one or not. Take, for example, the post at Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age ｻ Apples and Changes: What publishing can learn from the iPhone. The author sees the triumph of the multi-use device as the big story here, with profound implications for publishing.

I don't disagree, actually, but from my perspective, it's another example of the triumph of "show me the money." Once any content industry figures out how it can make more of it from letting loose than from holding tight, it will let loose. Copyright won't have to change for this to happen. It will just slip into the background from whence it came (before the Internet).

I had just read a few minutes before the Print is Dead blog post, that Harry Potter is making more money from sales and licensing of things other than the actual book. Granted, a toy Harry is probably protected by intellectual property rights too, but the toy Harry is holdable, carryable, posable. He can be digitized, obviously, but he becomes something else when he's digital. He has an additional value as a thing, and his sales success can take the pressure off making profits on the book content itself, that can be digitized (and over which you lose control if you digitize them).

So these two stories come together: the iPhone implication is that a multi-purpose media device is the missing link, that once it's widely in use, publishers (and Hollywood and everyone else) will understand why the stand-alone reader never succeeded, publishers will begin to respond to or even anticipate consumer demands and migrate to networked social environments and the difference between a book and the 'net will gradually fade away, entirely for some genres, not entirely for others. And copyright doesn't need to change for any of this to happen. It just becomes less relevant to the business of making profits, so it's not always necessary to assert it. So the theory goes.

Chapter II: next installment to follow after a year or two of iPhones ... In other words, "we'll see."