by Sarah Summers

On Wednesday, students gathered in Goddard Auditorium for the last convocation of the year, “Information Should Be Free.” The convocation, which discussed copyright laws and fair use, was applicable to the average modern student, who uses photocopying machines, scanners and peer-to-peer file sharing networks regularly.

The Price of Information

Prof. Pamela Samuelson at convocation, examining information “wanting to be free.” Photo by Oak Hawk.

Pamela Samuelson is a Professor of Information Management and Law at the University of California Berkeley. She began the convocation by listing the many places that information is free today-from libraries, the Internet, government archives, radio and TV. Samuelson asserted that free information has become more readily available in recent years because of technological advances.

To prove her point, she showed a picture of her great grandfather, who was a student at Earlham in the late 1800s. Using her computer and the Internet, Samuelson was able to scan the picture to her computer and enlarge until the title of the book in her great grandfather’s hand was readable. Upon finding out the title, Samuelson was able to find a biography of the author of the book on Wikipedia and an opportunity to bid on the book on Ebay.

“Pretty much every kind of human activity requires information, and we want that information to be free,” Samuelson stated, moving on to the main question the convocation raised: “Does information want to be free?”

She stated several times that she believes copyright protection is a positive thing. “The fundamental and constitutional goal of copyright is to promote the creation and dissemination of knowledge,” she stated. According to Samuelson, the exclusive right to their work gives authors incentive to continue creating work and making that work available to the public.

“If we went to a world without copyright, I don’t think it would be a better world,” she said firmly.

What Information Should be Free?

Having established her support for copyright protection, Samuelson proceeded to tackle the question of what qualifies as fair use of copyrighted material. Most of her scenarios and real life cases of copyright infringement dealt with information posted to the Internet. She discussed Lexicon, a Harry Potter fan site whose owner is currently being sued by JK Rowling and Warner Brothers because of his intention to write a Harry Potter encyclopedia.

She also spoke briefly about the “Internet Archive,” a website whose owner hopes to “make all of the world’s information available to all forever.” The site makes available archived versions of web content from as early as 1996. The audience was able to see the 1997 version of the Earlham website.

Questions

The speech raised many questions from the audience. Junior Aaron Goldbeck pointed out that the speech had focused primarily on copyright law in the United States and asked about international discussion of copyrights. Samuelson responded by saying that most countries in the world are members of the World Trade Organization, and are therefore obligated to provide copyright protection. However, there is discussion internationally about how strict these laws should be.

Several students brought up the question of patents on genetically modified crops and medication. Samuelson acknowledged that it was an important question, but firmly said that it was not an area that she was familiar with.

Freshman Clairellyn Smith raised the question of when copyright laws were actually enforced, mentioning as an example the practice at Earlham of professors photocopying articles for their students.

“How regulated is this, people are breaking the rules all the time,” she observed. Samuelson pointed out that until recently, making photocopies was much more difficult and expensive. With the modern ease of photocopying, she said that she hopes that we can become “more sensitive” to the interests of authors who create original works.

“Let’s accept that some information wants to be free, and other information wants to be expensive, and it is worthwhile to have both kinds in our ecosystem,” she said.