Lessig stirs up emotions

Larry Lessig’s talk at OSCON has stirred up emotions in the blogosphere. Dave Winer seems to be very angry because of Lessig’s asking “What have you done about it?” Doc Searls clarified what “it” means: “Larry is talking about the successful efforts by the entertainment industry to control the Net, mostly by getting Congress to endlessly expand the scope and terms of copyright law.” This as a response to Dave’s first post about Lessig’s talk. Obviously, as Doc writes, if we had done something about it, DMCA would at least have faced a stronger resistance in Congress.

Yesterday, Larry answered, and as far as I can see from reading his response and what Dave’s posts, Dave is of the opinion that the blog movement will provide such resistance (see here), while Larry thinks that isn’t enough: “in addition to blogging, and coding and whatever, we’ve got to do something that matters to these people who think a blog is a typo.”

Besides this, Larry and Dave disagree about copyright. Larry says (see also here) books are “open source”: the text is the code and you can study it and write your own book. But Dave disagrees, saying “you can only see the words [Hemingway] published, the publication does not reveal the process” and as for software, it’s all about ideas and those are conveyed with or without access to the source code, but closed source ensures that the programmers can get paid for their work. (See also Doc’s post about this.)

I definitely think there’s more material for study in a book than in a software program. The state of software development is quite poor, actually. If there weren’t such a thing as a compiler, perhaps more attention would be paid to the clarity of the design and the code? Or, perhaps not – open source programs are often very poorly written. Clarity isn’t a virtue. Somehow, it’s as if code must look like a submission to the Obfuscated C Code Contest to impress people. The fewer lines of code, the more clever the programmer. Theoretically, open source would yield readable code, but that isn’t (always) the case.

I’ll have to stop for now …