Copyfights and "hoarding"

Copyfight is another interesting blog about intellectual-property law at the dawn of the "digital millennium". This passage from Lawrence Lessig's recent appearance on behalf of the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act is quite interesting. Consider the following:

Larry: We're in the middle of a transition in the way people get access to content. The natural way now is to hoard. If the FCC doesn't screw it up, we could imagine that people in the future are persisently, ubiquitously connected. People would no longer need to be database managers. In that world the incentive to hoard goes away. Structure of access changes dramatically.

For "hoard", read: "assemble and maintain personal and institutional libraries." It's strange to think about it this way, considering the mutual hostility that exists between IP barons and librarians, but the existence of copyright law is one of the factors that necessitate the existence of widely-distributed libraries of books and other material in hard copies. Much published material from before the 1920's is readily available in full text on the Internet via Project Gutenberg and a myriad of other sources. The relative scarcity of legally available commercially-published material from more recent years is largely due to the requirements of copyright law and the threat of legal sanction should it be violated.

If, in some utopian Lessigian future, most seekers of information are indeed "persistently, ubiquitously connected", and the vast bulk of published information is readily available via that connection, many budget-minded academic and political administrators will predictably want to abolish the "cost center" of maintaining a library. After all, one might argue, it's just an expensive money-pit that duplicates what's already available for free.

Will readers' aesthetic preference for solid, printed books for personal reading be enough to keep libraries and bookstores open in such a world?

What about the need for stable and widely-distributed copies of documents of political or cultural importance? Jasper Fforde writes humorously about fictional villians removing characters from classic novels and otherwise wreaking havoc with the worlds inside books. His books are fantastic and funny because, after all, everyone knows that no one can suddenly and unilaterally alter the contents of every printed book, every copy of a newspaper or magazine, or every physically discrete CD or DVD or VHS tape in the world. But what about a world in which such hard copies were scarce, not readily available through libraries, or not published at all, or if the archived text existed only in a few centralized electronic fileservers? Several recent episodes have demonstrated that both private corporations and political rulers are all too eager to retroactively edit the published record when given the opportunity to do so by having that published record centralized in one easily-altered electronic archive. And of course, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four provided a warning, sixty years ago, of the uses to which a centralized "Ministry of Truth" might put its control over information.

Unfortunately, I'm skeptical of the impact that aesthetic pleasure or the vital-but-unremunerative need for redundant and independent recordkeeping will have on squinting budget-keepers or smoothly cynical political administrators. In my experience, library and university administrators are all too willing to pass the buck to other institutions, frequently without any concern for whether those unspecified other institutions are able or willing to take it. Public libraries blithely assume that academic libraries will pick up the slack; small and medium-sized academic libraries blithely assume that the Big U.'s and the state libraries will pick up the slack. Big U.'s predictably resent the resulting "parasitical" use of their collections, and state governors blithely (or cynically) abolish the state libraries when it suits their political purposes to do so.

This being the case, should librarians suppress their natural gag reflex and, in order to protect their profession, line up in support of the likes of Jack Valenti in their attempts to lock up intellectual property behind virtual electric fences and concertina wire? Or nobly follow the principle of free and open access to information toward a destination that may spell political doom for their institutions and their jobs? And, incidentally, abolish the very idea of a stable, reliable published record that isn't subject to political or mischievious tampering?