Free

Mr. Lessig Lawrence has very aptly titled the first chapter of his book 'The Future of Ideas' - Free. In this chapter he goes on to explore the 'ideal' and definition behind free and very systematically walks us through a quagmire of ideas to reach this goal. He begins with a very simple but vivid example to put everything into context. Imagine a world where you have to get everything that you put into a movie cleared. From the painting hanging on the wall to the design of the chair a character sits on. Oh - wait! Don't imagine. This is how the film industry works. The laws that govern the film industry seem absurd and Mr. Lessig argues rightly in my opinion that they are so. He quotes Davis Guggenheim ( a film director) in this reagrd.

"You are totally free to make a movie in an empty room, with your two friends."

In a world with this much control it is impossible to express your creativity and in essence what a director would create would be artificial and stifled. The ability to portray the world in its real form is taken away which is absurd whichever way you may look at it.

The author then discusses two kind of ideas. Firstly, there are ideas that are being argued about. Secondly and more importantly are ideas that are taken for granted. With the latter ideas, lies all the power because the society does not deem it necessary to challenge them or have a second look at them. Mr. Lessig points out that sometimes these 'taken for granted' ideas are very dangerous because they create a sort of blindness in the society. We are so accustomed to these ideas being absolute that we not only stop paying attention to them but also to their effects on the society. What happens if these effects are detrimental? Nothing because of our blindness. The author wants us to look at one such blind spot and challenge it. He wants to sow a seed of doubt so that the absolute no longer remains absolute.

Mr. Lessig goes on to list a few constraints on creativity, chief among them are the copyright laws that seem to now govern everything. Here he defines creativity and in my opinion this definition is very important to the whole discussion. "To take something old and to create something ever so slightly new." He goes on to question the idea of creating something completely new because after all you are drawing on something old whether you know it or not. There are some technical constraints such as distance between people, the availability of all the people at the same place at the same time. The cost of hiring people to perform tasks such as an orchestra to play music.

According to Lessig consumer signifies someone who is passive - a couch potato. In my opinion blog writers, digital artists and music mixers are not consumers of Internet services because a consumer only consumes. These people however are doing what society has done for years. They take an idea, reform it and then publish it and according to Mr. Lessig that is how our culture forms and improves. Keeping in mind this definition I believe its pretty clear that these people cannot be categorized as strictly 'consumers'.

Lessig then tells us that the struggle of the previous century was 'how' to regulate resources. The capitalists thought that the market was the best way to do it and the socialists thought that the government should have control over resources. That struggle has pretty much come to the conclusion that market is the better way to go. However, the question of our generation comes before that. Our question is that whether a resource should be regulated or not. In other words should a resource be free or otherwise.

What is a free resource? Here you understand why all the previous discussion was central to this debate. Here is the blind spot. Here is the ' taken for granted' idea that Lessig talked about in the beginning. The idea that control is good. This is why if I say something is free, people think a price is being quoted. The problem is that 'free' has a more basic and infinitely more important meaning. Take for example - free speech. No price is central to free speech. A resource is free if it can be used without permission or if the permission is granted neutrally.

Now we must explore why the dependence of how access is granted to a resource upon how the resource is produced is absurd. The roads we drive upon are a very good example. We pay a road tax but it has nothing to do with how the road was constructed. Its quite clear that this is the right way to go about things. It would be idiotic to charge for roads according to their production. We realize now that when the situation dictates, we should sensibly keep resource production and resource access independent of each other.

Important to note is the fact that not all resources can be made free because some resources would not be sustainable if they were made free. If theater's were not allowed to charge for showing movies then there would be no incentive for directors to put their creativity onto the big screen. Therefore, for creativity to flow the main thing is to sensibly choose which resources need to be controlled and which resources should be free. The question of our generation - whether a resource should be free or not?

Internet was supposed to bring freedom to the world and for a while it did so, but look closely and we realize that the internet only presents the 'illusion' of freedom these days. Increasingly, everything is being charged for and the freedom that internet promised is being curtailed. As Lessig explains about AOL, they are giving you many many ways to choose between many many things. So only your options have increased. This is not the freedom that internet was destined for, in fact its not freedom at all. This is a perfect example of the old bending the net to protect itself against the new. If everything became free, what would AOL charge its customers for, so they very cleverly package information and tailor it to your needs, then they charge you to access it. If internet is allowed to go its own way then you will not be needing AOL to tailor information to your needs, internet will take care of that itself.