DUBLIN, Ireland -- American copyright laws have gotten so out of hand that they are causing the death of culture and the loss of the world's intellectual history, according to Stanford technology law professor Lawrence Lessig.

Copyright has bloated from providing 14 years of protection a century ago to 70 years beyond the creator's death now, he said, and has become a tool of large corporations eager to indefinitely prolong their control of a market. Irving Berlin's songs, for example, will not go off copyright for 140 years, he said.

But a war is being waged against copyright hoarders in the corporate world by new technologies -- such as peer-to-peer communication programs -- that allow copyright to be circumvented, he said.

The idea that copyright exists for the benefit of artists, musicians, writers or programmers, he argues, is now laughable. New laws such as the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act are not speaking for those who create, but those who hold massive amounts of copyright, Lessig said.

Lessig was in Dublin to speak at the Darklight Digital Film Festival.

Copyright laws in the United States are placing the control of material into an increasingly fixed and concentrated group of corporate hands, he said. Five record companies now control 85 percent of music distribution, for example.

Because copyright law now also precludes derivative use of copyright material, people cannot develop new material based on copyrighted work without permission. Lessig said this radically changes how human culture will evolve, since the property owner has control over how that subsequent culture is built.

This restriction also stymies technological innovation, as developers cannot follow the long-established practice of taking existing code and enhancing it to produce something new, he said.

Because companies in industries such as music, publishing and film routinely demand that artists hand over copyright on their creative work, kids don't own their own culture, said Electronic Frontier Foundation founder John Perry Barlow, who also attended the conference.

The period of copyright primacy is going to end up as a huge hole in the cultural record.

Lessig said a major problem is the fact that copyrighted material simply vanishes because corporations aren't interested in keeping all that they copyright commercially available. Such material falls into a black hole where no one will have access to it, he said.

Belfast film producer Paul Largan of media company Bandigital said organizations that fund digital filmmakers demand the copyright to the work -- but they may never show the artists' film again after an initial screening. Copyright is key, he said, or a work just dies.

Another threat to the availability of cultural material such as older films, books and music is that it can be difficult or impossible to establish who owns the rights to a work if the company that once owned it goes out of business. If a corporation goes bankrupt, we're going to lose access to our culture, Lessig said.

But digital and Internet technologies have the potential to create a more diverse and open culture, he believes.

Digital production and the Internet could change all this, so that creative action and the distribution of these arts could be achieved in a much more diversified way than before, Lessig said. This would allow for a production of culture that doesn't depend on a narrow set of images of what culture should be.

A more open business model in which artists have greater control over their productions would create diverse, competitive industries rather than centralized, monopolistic companies, he said.

New technologies such as peer-to-peer-based communication and file-exchange programs could force a new look at copyright laws and profoundly change the methods of distribution, Barlow and Lessig both said.

Irish native and Freenet inventor Ian Clarke said he hopes Freenet will help artists distribute their works and find an audience and market for them. But he acknowledged the program could be threatened like Napster, Gnutella and FastTrack.

I do believe that through technology, the freedom to communicate can be guaranteed, Clarke said. It's certainly possible that Freenet could be banned. The question is whether that's enforceable.

But Lessig said using such programs only to get around existing copyright law did not offer any true freedom for artists. Freedom is only real when it's a real alternative --- not a subversive tactic facing the perpetual terrorism of lawsuits, he said.

He said Freenet will come under legal attack when it gets big enough.

Lessig added he doubts the system will change, because corporations hold enormous power and will do whatever they can to protect the survival of the dinosaurs over the coming of the mammals, he said.

But he also despairs that the younger generation that understands and uses digital technology is apolitical and indifferent. Libertarian netizens are also often politically pathetic, he said.

They don't believe they should waste their time, so they don't get involved.

Europe has also been passive, he warned, allowing the United States to set the agenda on global copyright law.

He said his first book, Code, was written to try to convince Net users that you've got to get enraged or it will be gone from under you.