Techcrunch has a post up by guest author Matt Rutherford which itself presents commentary on Larry Lessig's appearance on the Charlie Rose show (how many names can I fit in just one sentence?).  The gist of that appearance is conveyed by this quote from Mr. Lessig...

My real fear is that the last 10 years have unleashed a kind of revolutionary attitude among the generation that will take over in 10 years. And it will be hard for them to distinguish between sensible copyright legislation and the kind that we’ve got right now. So my real fear is we’re going to lose control of this animal… I just want to reform [copyright] to make it make sense.

One of the reason's I enjoy this blog so much is because it forces me to really focus on the "how" and "why" of other people's actions.  Because I can't just make a post that says "I disagree with this" and nothing else.  So in having to write a whole post I'm forced to fully digest the opinions of those I disagree with.

I've talked at length about copyright law and how Mr. Lessig is misguided in my opinion so I won't rehash that.  What I want to look at instead is something that occurred to me when considering the "why" of his opinions. 

It's evident from the quote above that Mr Lessig believes the majority of young people are against copyright law.  But where does that belief come from?  What I've begun to grasp is how the scale of the Internet can make people think there's a huge movement going on behind them when in fact there's not.  To illustrate this let me give an example.

In 1995 the Nation of Islam orchestrated the Million Man March which was a march on Washinton D.C. designed to demonstrate support for their political agenda.  They picked that name to convey just how overwhelmingly large the group they'd gathered was (and accordingly the support for their agenda was) .  A "million men" is hugely significant when one is talking about an actual get together.

But the reason that's significant is because of the effort it takes to actually, physically come out to the march.  That level of passion indicates there is a much larger group of people just as passionate who couldn't make it.

But on the web, a million people's support is fairly insignificant.  It takes no effort at all to browse to a web site meaning even the most casual supporter would come out.  So while a million actual people represents countless millions who couldn't make it a million web supporters represents...well...a million web supporters.

Since there's not barrier to their support you get your whole support base on the web.

This disparity between the amount of support that's significant in real life and the amount of support you can find on the Internet has, imho, caused people like Mr. Lessig to think they have more support than they actually do.  Because they haven't analyzed the difference I lay out above.  That in turn leads to an unrealistic view of the world where you think a majority of people agree with the loudest contingent on the web.

A belief that is rarely the case.

The fact that Mr Lessig could think a new generation is poised to "abolish copyright law completely" is a perfect example of this.  As I've pointed out before, even young people (the most susceptible to such an opinion) seem to be just fine with copyright law.  In fact, they choose to buy from the one vendor that imposes the most stringent protection of copyright which seems to indicate they simply don't care about the issue. 

But if one were to browse Digg on any given day you'd probably think just the opposite as it sometimes seems every other post is an indictment of copyright law in one form or another.  But Digg is a international site whose entire readership consists of less than 1% of 1% of the entire population.  A number that gets even smaller when you look at the number of users who actively participate (a site like Digg may have millions of readers but only a handful of those actually contribute).

So in the final analysis you need a massive amount of web support for it to mean anything in the real world.