Copyright maven and public rights activist Lawrence Lessig has posted a wonderful slide and audio overview of culture and copyright in the digital age. Lessig has been struggling against extended and inflexible copyright for years, and particularly the way it constricts the public access to creative works.
He traces some of the earlier struggles between established creative industries and new technology — back to the player piano. Then he explores how the current battle for creative rights in the digital age is both the same and dramatically different. His primary concern is that in the current war against the open use of new media (downloads, peer-to-peer networking, remixing and mash-ups), we’re destroying the potential expressions of the world to come. Says Lessig:
This is what this architecture begs for…. The freedom to remix not just words but culture, and to use a free digital network to spread it as broadly as the world demands it. This is what these technologies make possible. But here’s the point: As we wage war against piracy…we will kill these new forms of expression too. There’s an environment here…. And when we make the environment fit the 20th century models of doing business, we will destroy it’s potential for the 21st century forms of creativity. This is DDT sprayed to kill a gnat.
As stewards of creative expression and cultural heritage, we should all be aware of the issues involved, and how they might shape tomorrow’s ability to create and curate cultural expression. Give it a glance.
Maybe there’s room for optimism in the sense that some owners of intellectual property will recognize the massive audiences that can be reached by embracing mashups and user-generated content and will thus make their works freely available to the public.
What would happen if a major ballet company decided to put a 5-minute Nutcracker clip on YouTube and encouraged Internet users to create their own mashups?
Would this benefit the ballet company by reaching a larger audience that becomes actively involved in creating their own variations of the Nutcracker? Or would this offering somehow diminish the quality and beauty of the live performance?
For me the answer is easy: Get the Nutcracker online and you’ll grow your audience. But I haven’t found any dance companies that agree with me – yet.
Great points, Doug,
Unfortunately, you’d need agreement from a LOT of people before you could post even a portion of a Nutcracker performance on-line: the musicians, the dancers, the set designer, the costume designer, just to name a few. Existing footage is therefore a real bear to repurposes for the web. And it’s expensive to get new footage shot and produced.
That said, SOMEBODY has to be bold enough to give it a try! Let the mashups begin!
Hi Doug,
Check out this site: http://www.openbusiness.cc/