The Future of Ideas

Davis Guggenheim is a film director. He has produced a range of movies, some commercial, some not. His passion, like his father s before, is documentaries, and his most recent, and perhaps best, film, The First Year, is about public school teachers in their first year of teaching a Hoop Dreams for public education.

In the process of making a film, a director must clear rights. A film based on a copyrighted novel must get the permission of the copyright holder. A song in the opening credits requires the rights of the artist performing the song. These are ordinary and reasonable limits on the creative process, made necessary by a system of copyright law. Without such a system, we would not have anything close to the creativity that directors such as Guggenheim have produced.

But what about the stuff that appears in the film incidentally? Posters on a wall in a dorm room, a can of Coke held by the smoking man, an advertisement on a truck driving by in the background? These too are creative works. Does a director need permission to have these in his or her film?

Ten years ago, Guggenheim explains, if incidental artwork . . . was recognized by a common person, then you would have to clear its copyright. Today, things are very different. Now if any piece of artwork is recognizable by anybody . . . then you have to clear the rights of that and pay to use the work. [A]lmost every piece of artwork, any piece of furniture, or sculpture, has to be cleared before you can use it.

Okay, so picture just what this means: As Guggenheim describes it, [B]efore you shoot, you have this set of people on the payroll who are submitting everything you re using to the lawyers. The lawyers check the list and then say what can be used and what cannot. If you cannot find the original of a piece of artwork . . . you cannot use it. Even if you can find it, often permission will be denied. The lawyers thus decide what s allowed in the film. They decide what can be in the

Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at the Stanford Law School. Previously Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School from 1997 to 2000 and professor at the University of Chicago Law School from 1991 to 1997, he is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Trinity College, Cambridge, and Yale Law School. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court. He is a monthly columnist for The Industry Standard, a board member of the Red Hat Center for Open Source, and the author of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.

Dazzlingly inventive . . . It deserves to change the way we think about the electronic frontier. Los Angeles Times Book Review

A manifesto that shakes you up, making you aware of how much is lost when a culture turns ideas into intellectual property. The New York Times Book Review

A breath of fresh air in a crowded field . . . This book is a public service. The New York Times

Lessig is one of the brightest minds grappling with the consequences of the digital world today, as deft and original with technical intricacies as he is with broad legal theory. . . . The Future of Ideas succeeds marvelously. The Nation

Lessig s book will serve as an excellent guide. The Washington Post Book World