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Lessig on the World Social Forum
Raindance writes "Lawrence Lessig has a great article up on Technology Review about the World Social Forum held this past January in Brazil. In addition to telling an engaging story, it covers topics ranging from GNU and DRM to Brazil's interesting stance on the rights of foreign copyright holders, and is a good introduction to the permission culture/remix culture debate. It also makes me want to live in Brazil."
Don't be fooled; the software patent folly, the monopoly of huge corporations is also present here, perhaps not as big as in the U.S. or Europe, but it's growing. In our case, the situation is a little worse: the monopoly holder is foreign! If the operating system in almost all computers in American homes was from some Brazilian monopoly, I bet you would think something is very wrong. But here, in Brazil, we live by copying others, adopting foreign technologies, and never developing our own. We don't even play catch-up, for two reasons primarily: first, Brazil is a poor country and public money is very badly managed; research and development are secondary goals to making rich people, politicians, richer. Second, so-called first world is so ahead in technology that not a few think that pursuing our own self-sufficience in tech (not only IT, but science in general) is futile. Of course, there are a few and honourable exceptions (Cesar Lattes is a very well known physicist), but in general this is how we fare.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
"...but when your beloved GPL application turns up in a Brazilian program designed to create and share child pornography you won't exactly be laughing."
Poor argument against the GPL. Are you just pulling out the worst possible thing you can think of and sticking it in with GPL just to make it look bad?
You apparently, like many others, have no idea what intellectual property really means. And also no idea of its scope outside of where you reside.
What you are essentially "trying" to argue, is that tools (software under the GPL) may be used by people with bad intentions. I could point out many other tools that can be used with bad intentions, but I'm sure you could to.
The reality of IP is much different than people are willing to believe. Please don't throw in references to child pornography, etc. simply trying to evoke some sort of emotional response and sticking it with the GPL.
Question everything.
Don't put advice in your sig.
"The Waste Land" , by T.S. Eliot, published in 1923, IIRC, is one of the most prominent early examples of the "remix culture". At least a third of Eliot's text consists of quotes from other writers, including reviews on Wagner, popular songs, reformation playwrights, and translations of Eastern mystics. In today's terms, it would be a massive copyright violation, on the lines of the quote from the Rolling Stones that cost the Verve so much of their royalties from "Bittersweet Symphony".
My point is that there is a "high culture" version of this "remix culture" that has existed for a long time (classical musicians would often quote from each other). Perhaps acknowledgement of this might encourage legislators to accept that protection of the rights of older artists stifles the creativity of new ones. (This relates to the patent debate in a thread further down the front page).
Actually, the bottom line is that it is going to happen, one way or the other. Individuals may suffer from this, like the Verve, who lost the revenues from a hit album, but others will gain, like kids in poorer countries, who are not viable targets for US trial lawyers.
1) so a guy took a bunch of his home movies, mixed them on an iMac and ended up winning an award at the Cannes film festival. Lessig asks "what if he wanted to mix someone else's video with his own? He couldn't". That totally didn't make any sense. You just proved that you don't need to be able to use other people's material freely to get into Cannes. Next time pick an example that had something to do with your point.
I think the point he was trying to make is that if content were "free" to begin with, one would not have to rely on one's own personal collection of media to create a "remix." You would be able to elaborate upon the work of others, much the same way that functionality is added to existing free software. While Lessig's example may not have been delivered in the clearest of context, I still believe it is a valid example.
Side Note: I create music, and while I have done remixes of existing songs, the goal was never to overshadow the original, but to reflect whatever inspiration I received from the original as an accent to that song. Very much the same way two different people can read the same book and walk away with different insight.
I agree with you and Lessig on remixing. "remixing" has been the constant through history, the fact that it's frowned upon today is the aberration. Classical composers "ripped off" each other all the time, and apparently it was popular with Shakespearean era playwrights and singers as well. Look at Jazz--I can't describe the type of liberation I felt when I realized that it was OK and good that people mess around with each others' stuff. TV fan fiction, it's usually better than the TV show, which is a win for culture in some small way.
I fucking love the Japanese concept of Doujinshi, where someone else can just make their own comic stories using someone elses characters. Premise is that no one buying the doujinshi instead of the real thing, which is demonstrably true. Japanese society hasn't collapsed, someone should take note of that.
Having waded through all 9 pages of the article I agree that it was quite fine, like most of what Lessig writes.
I think there is something going on, which he barely hints at, that will come to be important. The World Social Forum is not an event mainly focused around copyright law or free software. It is an event organized for a myriad of global popular movements of a generally leftist character -- for economic justice, environmental preservation, indigenous rights, gender and racial equality, and so on. It is one of the focal points of what is sometimes called (I would say erroneously) the "anti-globalization" movement.
What we are seeing here is a convergence between those movements and free software. From the standpoint of leftists, it is quite natural: If you are interested in alternative forms of social organization (to unrestricted free-market capitalism) both the way open-source communities function and the nature of the software itself as a public resource are a prime example of how such an organization could work.
On the other hand I imagine parts of the open-source community would be very wary of the association: After all, many community leaders go to great lengths to be as apolitical as possible, or even are outspoken conservatives or libertarians, and have spent years trying to persuade major corporations that supporting open-source does not mean destroying capitalism. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre