When is common sense common?

Photo by: PugnoM

The other day I suddenly saw things in a new light, it was when I the video clip with Lawrence Lessig from the TED conference one more time. The first time I saw it I didn’t like Lessig’s conclusion about changing the laws of copyright, just because “our kids” (as he calls it) are breaking it. In my eyes that is not the way to build a society – you can’t change the law every time somebody breaks it.

But seeing his talk again I discovered the connection between how Lessig thinks the law should be changed now and how it was changed back when the law of trespassing made farmers complaint about the airplanes flying over their land.

Perhaps I was the only one who didn’t see this connection the first time, but it made me feel more open towards changing the copyright law, because the example with the trespassing was so clear and obvious. As will the example with a changed copyright law perhaps be in 50 years or so.

One thing I still find a bit hard to accept is one of Lessig’s arguments for changing the law; common sense. Just looking at how many different definitions Wikipedia gives of the phrase common sense makes me wonder how you can use common sense as an argument for changing a law. What is common sense to me may not be common sense to somebody else and so fort.

Still I would argue most people today think it was common sense to change the law about trespassing, but that was then and this is now. The context in which we form common sense is different. No one can argue against the fact that we know more now, than we did 50, 100 and 150 years ago.

But the common sense from which laws like the copyright law idealistically should be inspired from, in the eyes of Lessig, comes in different colors and sizes. And I think it is very difficult to say, who has the most “common” common sense; perhaps it’s Lessig, perhaps it’s the politicians, perhaps it’s the kids, who are breaking the rules. Perhaps it is just not as easy to change the copyright law, as it was to change the law about trespassing. Either ways it is necessary to acknowledge that there is more than one common sense in this copyright question, and that could be the reason why a solution is not that easy to find.