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.
He acknowledges great opportunities that permit art and commerce to thrive in our new hybrid economy. Yet the RIAA continues to litigate, suing individuals for monetary gain. YouTube is being forced to alter posted videos due to old-money ideas and their lawyers.
But with the unprecedented growth of the internet and YouTube which serves over 1 BILLION videos each day all the lawyers in the world will not be able to keep up to date. In the US alone over 12 billion are watched everyday. And after all the lawyers for the RIAA would rather sue wealthy people in America than say 1 BILLION poor people in China. Its no wonder some internet media companies have their physical servers outside the US – since copyright is not equal under the law of every nation with a fast ISP.
Tags: Larry Lessig, Remix, art and commerce, copyright, creative commons, ReadWrite Culture, old money, Media Empires, YouTube, Change, control, trends