Regrettably the Vancouver Olympics interrupted my reading pattern and its been a slow recovery. I blogged about this book as soon as I learned it was in production back in August. Yikes!
I have been following Larry Lessig‘s work on copyright and our digital culture for some time, reading his positions online, previous books and keynote addresses at TED, Wired and last week to Italy’s Parliament among others. His work on Creative Commons is a direct action from the creative limitations of copyright.
His latest book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy is a very easy read for anyone who has also known his work. He tells an important story about how new technology is clashing with old money.
Lessig illustrates how copyright’s old money (the big media empires) are clashing with today’s society and technology. Old money is winning financial amounts here and there, but ultimately they are cutting their own throat as they can no longer control content. Their motto: since we cannot have it our way anymore (due to the easy distribution of digital content) we are going to sue as many people as we can and take outrageous amounts of money along the way.
Lessig simply points out the two different camps: Read-only versus Read-Write. Look at popular consumer phones and computers. Today anyone can create a short video and post it to YouTube. And by today’s “standard” in social networking — your somewhat expected to post multimedia content on Facebook and YouTube for example.
But post a 29 second video of a baby dancing to Prince’s Lets Go Crazy and Universal Music (they own Prince and his music) files a lawsuit claiming copyright violations. Its old money trying to control society and Lessig points out it clearly no longer works.