Renowned American lawyer Lawrence Lessig is a Harvard Law School professor and director of its Center for Ethics. Well known for defending the cause of internet freedom, he is one of the most respected voices in debates on the limits of online copyright, the most controversial subject at the e-G8 in Paris, on 24-25 May.
Rights holders are building pressure in Europe for better protection of copyright on the internet, especially through screening for illegal content or use of the French Hadopi model of warnings and sanctions. What are your views?
In my opinion, before we ask ourselves how to implement copyright on the internet, we should ask ourselves what copyright should be like. In other words, we need the effects of copyright laws but we have to give thought to the right architecture. Copyright laws regulate culture far too much today. Their scope is too wide. When you see children take things on the internet, combine them and share them with their friends: all of that is ambiguous from the standpoint of European copyright laws, it's even clearly not authorised. But why should these laws regulate the lives of children who take videos on the internet and share them with their friends? That should be something to encourage, not to regulate. First, we should hold a debate on the scope of copyright laws. Where can they be improved? How can we create incentives for the innovation we need? This is about the future. We have these totally ineffective laws from the 20th century and now we are thinking up the most vicious ways of applying them. That doesn't make sense. We need a discussion on what copyright laws should be like in the digital era. It used to be that if you had never touched a photocopying machine, then you had never breached copyright. Today, we live in a world where the slightest gesture raises the problem of copyright. The difference is tremendous. Let's find other solutions, maybe direct commercial transactions, but I don't want to make assumptions about the outcome.
Which countries are most advanced?
Germany leads the way, in my view, with Sweden. The United Kingdom engaged in a real intellectual debate on the fact that we need to think differently. But governments are not taking action yet.
And which are lagging behind the most?
This one here [France - Ed].
Telecoms operators are pressuring European policy makers to be allowed to intervene on the internet and to secure bandwidth
We need to keep in mind the brief history of high-speed internet. In 1996, the United States adopted the Telecommunications Act. It entails the ideas of open access and neutrality. The rest of the world, like Japan, the United Kingdom and Europe, follows these same principles of open access and making competition easier. The United States soon changed its policy, however. During the Bush era, all the 1996 commitments - open access and neutrality - were reversed. I remember when that happened. I took part in a debate and said that we were going to go through a very interesting experience: the United States would end up working by one set of rules and the rest of the world by another. The experience came to an end. Then came the fantastic report by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) - which the FCC itself ignored - demonstrating a radical difference in the success of high-speed connections: the countries that continued to implement open access and neutrality policies had the fastest and least expensive internet, including France, and the countries that followed the United States had terrible results. We could have expected more countries to follow the European and French model (prices in the United States are very high and connections are slow). But now we are starting to see people in Europe talk about switching to the American model. Even though it's a failure! Why? Because telecoms companies in Europe want this policy. There is no net neutrality in the United Kingdom but there is more competition in high-speed access. This competition could be called into question. And I think that it is Britain's goal to adopt the American model.
You said you were surprised that France pays more heed to business interests than to civil society...
I am not surprised by Nicolas Sarkozy because we know him. But I am surprised that a French president thinks that public policies should result from what companies think. That is what the American government has done for years. Yet companies are paid by their shareholders to say what is in their interests, not the country's interests. It is surprising to see that here in France. Sarkozy is acting like an American.
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