all horse force

So all the comments from this entry were great. I think the experiment was a success, or at least I feel a lot better about the state of the essay. Here’s the latest draft:

Personal Statement, Draft 2:

I want to go to law school because of the internet. Not because I found out about the wonders of legal education and the grandeur of first-year associate salaries from an online discussion board, but because of an organization called Project Gutenberg. It’s been around longer than I have, but I first encountered it when my family connected to the Prodigy service in 1992. During the course of my first experience with online discussion boards, I found out two things: first, that not all Amy Grant fans were as peaceful and gentle as they seemed, and second, that Project Gutenberg was attempting to take books in the public domain and make them freely available online to the whole world. Now, the former discovery was a bit shocking to my 12-year-old mind, but I wasn’t even ready for the latter. Having sent a few emails back and forth, I was beginning to understand how the internet was going to make communication easier, but I hadn’t yet imagined the possibility of communicating entire books. In my mind books were still big, ponderous things that one carried around in a bag, and their availability was limited to my house, the library, and Barnes & Noble. Suddenly I was being told that many of the greatest books in history were only minutes away from anyone connected (now it’s more like seconds away, but back then a 2400 baud modem was the hottest thing on the streets).

Some years later I realized that a wall had come down. This network of computers and people had become one of the greatest repositories of human knowledge in what amounts to a historical instant. What’s more, it was growing, and it has continued to grow, faster and faster, such that Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, has recently stated that universal access to all human knowledge–past, present, and future–is now possible. For the cost of one year’s missile defense programs, he could archive it all and make it available to all comers. Sure, that would save me a few trips to my local public library, but when you consider what such an archive could mean for remote villages around the world with a phone line but no access to a library, the proposition moves swiftly from a nice convenience to a moral imperative.

So much knowledge could be accessible through the internet, yet it is not, and as I understand it, U.S. intellectual property laws are largely to blame. I have enormous respect for intellectual property; my father, as a photographer, makes his living from it. But I’m also deeply worried that in focusing too narrowly on enabling creators and their descendants to control uses of their work we are in danger of squelching the vibrant public domain that has made our culture so prolific and rich. In seeking a legal education I am trying to understand, among other things, the best ways to balance and redefine the rights of the public with the rights of the creator. I want to work towards Kahle’s concept of a universal archive, a digital Library of Alexandria that is freely available to anyone who cares to access it. I also want the creators of all that work to be fairly compensated, but I believe that compensation needs to encourage them to create more work, not to squeeze every last penny out of their existing work.

In short, I want to go to law school because I believe in the internet. I believe it has the potential to educate the world and to push us towards new frontiers of creativity, but only if we can find a better balance in the laws of intellectual property.

evan :: Nov.02.2004 :: Notices :: 1 Comment »

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