The democratic merits of blogging
I finished reading Lessig's Free Culture (see an earlier post to download your free copy) yesterday. Lessig, a blogger himself, has this take on blogging:

Discussing matters of public import, criticizing others who are mistaken in their views, criticizing politicians about the decisions they make, offering solutions to problems we all see: blogs create the sense of a virtual public meeting, but one in which we don't all hope to be there at the same time and in which conversations are not necessarily linked. The best of the blog entries are relatively short; they point directly to words used by others, criticizing with or adding to them. They are arguably the most important form of unchoreographed public discourse that we have.

Blogs are taking the place of the Roman stoa and the French salon.

The gist of the book is this: In many times in history, a new technology changed the way content was distributed. And in all instances, the law accomodated the new technology. This pattern of legal accomodation, this pattern of deference to new technologies has now changed with the rise of the Internet. Rather than striking a balance between the claims of a new technology and the legitimate rights of content creators, both the US courts and Congress have imposed legal restrictions that will have the effect of smothering the new to benefit the old.

A story used by Lessig earlier in his book is most illustrative of the accomodation that he speaks of. Before the Wright brothers invented the airplane, American law held that a property owner presumptively owned not just the surface of his land, but all the land below, down to the center of the earth, and all the space above, to “an indefinite extent, upwards.” A flying plane therefore under this doctrine was a trespasser to private property since property rights were understood to extend up to the sky. The US Supreme Court in this case overturned the old doctrine and enunciated a new one: that the air is a public highway. Were that not true, every transcontinental flight would subject the operator to countless trespass suits.

Lessig argues for that same kind of accomodation with the internet. His outline of an alternative model of peer to peer file sharing, which appears in the last chapter, is a bit hazy though, but the book is a good read for internet aficionados.