Lessig’s answer to the problem of financial support is to spend a page and a half on an idea floating around academia that the government should fund music by socializing it. “An appropriate tax” would be levied, and the pot divvied up according to the number of downloads of each item. This is a strange idea, full of practical problems; it would be even more difficult to apply to movies, software, games, or books, which will present the same Napsterization problems as music once true broadband becomes available to consumers and download times decrease.
Nor are the horror stories Lessig uses to prove the degeneracy of the copyright system particularly impressive. The Free Culture Movement has a long memory, and it has not yet forgiven the London booksellers for monopolizing the printed word back in the 17th century. Similarly emphasized are Thomas Edison’s efforts to enforce his patents on the movie camera, the resistance of sheet-music publishers to the player piano, and the suppression for decades of FM radio (which Lessig attributes to RCA, with barely a mention of the FCC and the heavy hand of government). The Movement is forced to rely on past issues—and its interpretation even of many of them is not exactly nuanced—because its contemporary horror stories are so unimpressive. For the most part, they represent genuine problems, but of a minor kind: issues that should and can be addressed by the legal process through measures considerably short of uprooting the whole copyright system.
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