By Matthew Guerrieri <\/p>\n
I’ll concur up front with Lessig’s underlying argumentative framework: that copyright law, in its current state, is onerous and impractical, and that using the courts to determine IP licensing guidelines is ham-fisted and counterproductive.<\/p>\n
There were two things, though, that I kept thinking while reading the book. They’re kind of related. The first has to do with Lessig’s whole idea that we need to decriminalize read\/write culture–remixing, amateur mash-ups, &c.–because otherwise we’re branding creative activity as criminal. The parade of Western artistic activity (especially in the last century) has included no small number of outlaws and transgressors. Make certain activity legal–even activity that, in a sane world, should be legal–and there’s no shortage of artists (or artistic kids) who will simply seek out another illegal channel. Lessig’s interviewed artists all struck me as either unusually earnest or slightly disingenuous; the aesthetic frisson<\/i> of rule-breaking is a constant in artistic history. (Do you think Shepard Fairey isn’t at least slightly pleased that Boston cops keep giving him a hard time?)<\/p>\n
This might just seem like aesthetic posturing at the margins, but it’s salient to the other thing I kept thinking. If you look at the history of mass media–particularly since World War II, when mass media became lucrative enough to attract people more interested in profit than content–the most artistically rich and rewarding content has come during what might be called “nobody knows anything” periods, when technology and tastes changed too fast for corporate structure to keep up: rock-and-roll in the late 50s\/early 60s, Hollywood in the late 60s\/early 70s, pop music in the late 80s\/early 90s (hip-hop and grunge), and so forth. If Lessig is right that hybrid economies–which leverage the community aspects of internet activity–are starting to emerge as workable corporate models, my instinct is that it signals the end of the current internet’s “nobody knows anything” phase, and online culture is about to get a lot more corporatized. Lessig uses Lucasfilm’s attempt to leverage community–accompanied by draconian licensing terms–as an example of a corporation that doesn’t “get it,” but who’s to say that, in fact, Lucasfilm doesn’t actually understand it all too well? “Star Wars” was the gateway from the nobody-knows-anything New Hollywood to the corporatized Hollywood of the 80s, after all.<\/p>\n
As Lessig extolled each example of a hybrid economy (none of which, by the way and as far as I can tell, actually pay their content creators anything), what I kept wondering was not what a widespread network of such hybrids would look like, but instead at what point that corporatization would trigger a rebellion, and what form that rebellion would take. To use Lessig’s categories: my gut feeling is that, the more commerce thrives in Web 2.0, the more art will migrate to Web 3.0, whatever that might be. Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure the RIAA won’t like it.<\/p>\n
Oh, one more thing, in re: page 95–I’ve <\/i>listened to Schoenberg pieces a hundred times. Leck’ mich<\/i>, Lessig!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Matthew Guerrieri I’ll concur up front with Lessig’s underlying argumentative framework: that copyright law, in its current state, is onerous and impractical, and that using the courts to determine IP licensing guidelines is ham-fisted and counterproductive. There were two things, though, that I kept thinking while reading the book. They’re kind of related. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-107","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-bookclub","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}