It’s a bit of a thicket to untangle the impact of law on the expressive life of a nation. Law is dry and detached. Expression is explosive and personal. And yet the laws that govern ownership and property do define the context and quality of expression. That makes them the direct business of arts and cultural managers.
Larry Lessig has long been helping define the power and the peril of copyright laws in the emerging on-line expressive world. And he does so clearly and compellingly in this TED talk, recently posted online.
Worth a look and a listen.
Lawrence Lessig (I don’t feel comfortable calling him Larry) is certainly one of our greatest copyright scholars. But I didn’t hear him really say much in this piece. He touched on John Fiske’s concept of “semiotic democracy,” and though lamenting the law’s sometime-stranglehold on creativity, he didn’t outline any real action items. More interesting might be an examination of what Professor Sonia Katyal has termed, “semiotic disobedience.” Though I’m still plowing through Katyal’s paper, the general idea seems to be: if you want change, sometimes you have to have the guts to throw the tea into the harbor.
I also take issue with Professor Lessig’s rose-colored view of BMI. BMI is every bit a member of the public performance cartel that’s hopelessly skewed in favor of the big money music machines and against independent artists.