The Difference Between Ideas And Execution -- And What's Missing From 'The Social Network'

By pretty much all accounts, The Social Network sounds like a fantastic movie (which is what you'd expect from Aaron Sorkin). At this point, it's been made clear a hundred times over that it's a work of fiction, rather loosely based on the truth, rather than an accurate depiction of what actually happened in Facebook's early days. However, Larry Lessig does an excellent job highlighting why, even as it's a great movie, it's dangerously misleading about how innovation works. The key point, as we've made in the past, Facebook -- the idea -- wasn't anything special. There were tons of social networks out there. What made it special was the execution, which Facebook did like no one else has done before or since.

Except, as Lessig notes, in the movie, a totally different portrait is painted. One where execution is meaningless, and only ideas and lawyers seem to matter:

In Sorkin's world--which is to say Hollywood, where lawyers attempt to control every last scrap of culture--this framing makes sense. But as I watched this film, as a law professor, and someone who has tried as best I can to understand the new world now living in Silicon Valley, the only people that I felt embarrassed for were the lawyers. The total and absolute absurdity of the world where the engines of a federal lawsuit get cranked up to adjudicate the hurt feelings (because "our idea was stolen!") of entitled Harvard undergraduates is completely missed by Sorkin. We can't know enough from the film to know whether there was actually any substantial legal claim here. Sorkin has been upfront about the fact that there are fabrications aplenty lacing the story. But from the story as told, we certainly know enough to know that any legal system that would allow these kids to extort $65 million from the most successful business this century should be ashamed of itself. Did Zuckerberg breach his contract? Maybe, for which the damages are more like $650, not $65 million. Did he steal a trade secret? Absolutely not. Did he steal any other "property"? Absolutely not--the code for Facebook was his, and the "idea" of a social network is not a patent. It wasn't justice that gave the twins $65 million; it was the fear of a random and inefficient system of law. That system is a tax on innovation and creativity. That tax is the real villain here, not the innovator it burdened.

It's too bad, if not surprising, that the film decides to celebrate this tax on innovation and creativity as if it makes sense.

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