Who Will Own Ideas?
Lawrence Lessig seems to be championing a world that would trend toward stasis ("The People Own Ideas!"). Creative thinking would be the territory of those who were independently wealthy or premeditatedly poor. People desiring to support their families would live in a world where the norm involved applying the equivalent of every filter on Photoshop and GarageBand to bits of someone else's work. Altruism may feel good in the abstract, but living it rubs human nature the wrong way. If everybody owns ideas, no one owns ideas. And perhaps no one has ideas -- or at least any they are willing to share. A generation from now, there will be an underground and then a groundswell of superb proprietary software (and music and art) created by people who value their work and are not willing to cast it into the faceless "open" sea.

James Wish
Medway, MA