Lawrence Lessig’s new book, “The Future of Ideas,” reviewed on Salon today. I saw Lessig speak a couple weeks ago at the Internet Wayback Machine launch, and he’s delivering the evening keynote tonight at the O’Reilly P2P conference. He’s a way, way smart guy, and he is full of interesting, one-of-a-kind insights into the nature of civil liberties, law and policy online.

In “The Future of Ideas” Lessig argues that future prosperity is impossible without the freedom to innovate — but that freedom is under attack by vested interests. Lessig’s effort to bind innovation to prosperity is as big an idea, perhaps, as Adam Smith’s rebuke to the mercantilists in “The Wealth of Nations.” Although free-market capitalists look to Smith as their intellectual fountainhead, Smith was not battling the yet-to-be-born Karl Marx in the latter part of the 18th century. He took aim at those who believed that a nation’s prosperity could be measured by the gold it acquired. Prosperity, Smith reasoned, was an ongoing process.

Lessig offers a similar insight about the information economy at the turn of the 21st century. Prosperity requires progress and progress requires innovation. But while some intellectual property theorists and the shareholders of Disney may favor the extension of intellectual property rights into the infinite future, the long-term impact of an economic system that piles high property rights, while burying the intellectual commons that makes progress possible, could be that all new forms of production grind to a halt.

LinkDiscuss