Lessig told a WIPO conference on copyright licensing last week that the problems being faced by users of material and by businesses such as record or film companies that are based on copyright licensing are not caused by young people's lawlessness. The problem is the copyright system itself, he said.
Lessig backed the view of University of Michigan professor Jessica Litman, who said that copyright law used not to impinge on everyday life, but that almost everyone runs up against it every day now, because every cultural artefact is a 'copy'.
Lessig said that the problem is “not about a generation that can’t respect the rules, it’s a problem in the design of the system", according to news service Intellectual Property Watch.
Lessig said that the copyright system will "never work on the internet. It’ll either cause people to stop creating or it’ll cause a revolution,” according to Intellectual Property Watch.
Lessig said that the problem is caused by the fact that most of the cultural artifacts we use in everyday life are now digital, which means that copies must be made by individuals if that material is to be shared, stored or manipulated.
This was not the case before the ubiquity of digital media, he said. Reading a book or lending or reselling it is "unregulated" activity which is nothing to do with copyright law, he said. The same activities in relation to digital media might involve the law, though.
“Most of us can no longer spend even an hour without colliding with the copyright law,” Lessig said. "Its failure is not an accident. It is implicit in the architecture of copyright as we inherited it. It does not make sense in a digital environment.”
Lessig told the conference that we should welcome the fact that the internet has restored the "read-write" nature of human culture after a century in which mass media had made participation in culture a more passive affair.
The law should accept and reflect this, he said, according to Intellectual Property Watch. "We are not going to kill these technologies,” he said. “We can’t stop the kids’ creativity, only drive it underground. [We] can’t make our kids passive, we can only make them pirates.”
WIPO said that the Global Meeting on Emerging Copyright Licensing Modalities, held in Geneva, was designed to help institutions understand some of the problems surrounding copyright law.
It was held to "gather governments, national and international public institutions, academics and an array of stakeholders involved in different copyright licensing practices ... to raise the awareness of Member States on the complexities underlining a vast variety of licensing practices in different sectors, including the online market for music, the software industry and open access publishing," said a WIPO statement. "The target topics will be analyzed and discussed from an intellectual property and a competition law perspective."
Lessig said that the copyright system could only be fixed if WIPO took a leading role in its reform.
