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Lessig Defends Free Culture in Keynote
lisah writes "Professor Larry Lessig, a keynote speaker at this week's Linux World Expo, took issue with current copyright laws and their effect on a free read-write culture. Lessig says that, by today's standards, the simple act of creating a video mashup renders its creator a 'pirate' and argued for sweeping changes that would embrace a fair use culture. Lessig asked the audience to consider sharing works under a Creative Commons license and redirect money they would spend on restricted content to organizations that support a fair use and free culture. He says that opponents of a free read-write culture have strong financial and political backing so unified community support is crucial. 'If the debate is controlled by lawyers and lobbyists...," says Lessig, 'this debate will be lost.'"
Most people are going to look at Dr. Lessig and fail to grasp why this is important at all. Until we all realize that we're being ripped off, and that this kind of freedom IS important, we're going to be stuck with the media giants telling us where, when, and how we can use "their content."
That's funny. Compare a Ferrari from 1983 (random date) that cost $230,000 to make and sold for $800,000 to a baseball card from 1930 that cost $0.02 and sold for $0.50. The Ferrari is less worth today, but the baseball card increases its value. Conclusion: the price of a good does not depend on the cost, but the on the desire of the buyer. The more desire there is for a product, the higher the price will be. Austrian Economics, check it out.
Good idea in theory. In practice, that's communism. And as we already know, that didn't and continues not to do so well. (Compare: someone who polishes turds. Should he get paid for the hard work he does?)
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
If I want to do a movie on Vampires, should I have to pay someone? You mess Lessig's point. Culture by definition builds upon its past. Vampires, elves, bad ass action heroes, our concept of aliens, formulaic romantic comedies, guitars, a generic punk sound, a whiny emo sound, and all other pieces of "entertainment" are all "mashups" in one way or another. All of the above exist ONLY because of culture that they were built upon. None of the above have any meaning to a stone aged tribal person living in the rainforest. These are not concepts that spring magically from the human mind. These are concepts that have evolved in our culture. Lessig's point is that we are stunting culture by following back every creative idea to its source and asking permission before we use it.
If you had to go back and ask the originators punk if you could use their sound and they had an absolute veto over it, we might very well not have punk and all the other types of music that sprung from that branch in the musical tree. The same goes for more other examples. Today, you can merrily write about vampires without worry of a lawsuit, but if you try and write about another fictional villain, say a Star Wars Sith Lord, and you will find your ass sued into the ground. This SHOULD be troubling. Our ability to create new culture is being stunted by demanding that anyone wants to bud off of some other creative needs to ask the original authors permission. Instead of having an explosion of stories and mythos from worlds from our popular culture, we have tightly controlled and stunted versions.
Further, even the most pro-copyright minded person MUST see the insanity of copyrights that last CENTURIES. Lessig doesn't argue for an end to copyright. He argues for some sort of sanity in it. Giving people copyrights that exists well past their death and then some is crazy. Dead artists don't need their works protected. If you want to use a Robert Frost poem, you damn well should be able to. The guy has been dead for almost half of a centaury yet you can still find your ass sued if you post one of his poems on the Internet.
No matter what you think of copyright, you MUST agree that the current system is insane and needs fixing. Perhaps you might not want to take it as far as Lessig does, but you certainly must agree that a mean who died in 1949 doesn't need his work to continue to waste away under copyright protection.
The entire purpose of Copyright, as it was initially envisioned, was to create a thriving public domain to benefit the people as a whole. Yes, that which others had spent money on was originally intended to be free after a time, in order to allow the creator time to make a profit before their work was contributed to the public. As a limited sort of monopoly, it more or less did what it was intended.
Through gratuitous copyright extension however, the system has been perverted into what is primarily a vector with which to attack others through the legal system. What was originally supposed to be a way to increase the size and quality of the public domain is now being used to create virtually unlimited monopolies on information. Whatever view you may have on copyright, it's certainly not being used as it was originally intended. The Creative Commons is a step in the right direction, but we're still stuck with the problem.
GPL: Free as in will
I suppose that the validity of that statement is rather dependent upon the jurisdiction under which you have chosen to live. As for the dire consequences of this particular example, I shall be hard pressed to lose much sleep; first of all, the statement only applies in those circumstances in which the creator of the video clip does not desire to allow you to use their product in such a manner; if one find such a practice objectionable, one is free (nay, encouraged) to go forth and produce more free content which one may then release under more permissive conditions. Surely society would be well served by an increase in the amount of original content facilitated by such a course of action. Furthermore, the primary valid reason which would prompt one to desire to create a "video mashup" would appear to be satire, which I believe is still protected under most jurisdictions irrespective of the wishes of the person whose work is being satirized; as such, I fail to notice the problem. In the unseemly circumstance that the owner of the work does not desire to allow their work to be satirized, and the jurisdiction under which one finds themselves actually cares about such matters, one is presented with two options: relocation, or the creation of satire without inclusion of the original subject matter in one's own work. Neither of these two options seem all that horrendous.
Both of those appear to be reasonable courses of actions; I am impressed with the apparent understanding of both the philosophy of individual liberty and the workings of the free market exhibited by this individual.
I am unfamiliar with the finer nuances of the English language. When one refers to an entire group ("opponents"), without using an adjective such as "some," does one imply that the rest of the sentence applies to every person belonging to that group? Can one be a proponent of "free read-write culture" without having strong financial and political (whatever that means) backing? If I were to become a supporter of "free read-write culture," would I instantaneously receive "strong financial and political backing?" Is the intention to imply that one cannot be a proponent of the ideology espoused by this individual by one's own convictions, but rather, only by having some sort of sinister motive or receiving a large cash payoff?
How can a debate be controlled by "lawyers and lobbyists," and even if such a thing was possible, how would this lead to the loss of the debate? If you have truth and reason on your side, you shall surely win the debate if both parties are allowed to express themselves. That being said, one may surely lose the battle of having one's ideas implemented by law, but seeing as the two ideas mentioned by the individual above were matters of individual choice and working within the free market, I fail to see what "lawyers and lobbyists" have to do with anything. After all, neither lobbyists nor lawyers shall prevent free citizens from "sharing works under a Creative Commons license and redirect money they would spend on restricted content to organizations that support a fair use and free culture" as long as the citizens in questions can be referred to as free.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
That's one of many options. If there a lot options, usually a free market can make the right decision (not the best, just the right). Let's get rid of the state-enforced monopoly that is copyright and see with what option businesses come up with. Try DRM? Fine with me. But don't legislate it.
Well if we're going to remove artificially create rights and restrictions we also need to get rid of most laws. Or are you being hypocritical? Why do YOU have a monopoly on your property? I should be able to take whatever I want, sure you can stop me or try to but I should be able to freely shoot you dead as well.
Good idea in theory. In practice, that's communism.
Huh? By that reasoning all artificial rights are communism. Everything short of total anarchy is communism.
There is no such thing as a "right to make money". All you have is a right to try. You know, freedom?
I write fairly innovative software (clustereding stuff) for a start up. If they become successful enough, they might sell out to Oracle or - god forbid -, Microsoft. If they do, some people will make a bundle. I'll make nothing.
Some may argue that I poorly negotiated my contract, that I should have stock options, whatever. And they's be right, too.
The point is that I do that because I like it. If people are more creative than I am at making money, good for them. Of course I'll be jealous for a while, I'm human.
If I had chosen another job, or went painting, similar stuff would have been created anyway. If there was no copyright, I'd be buried in NDAs, but I'd be doing it anyway. So it's not like the people would be loosing anything. Somebody else is probably doing paintings similar to what might have "created".
The whole idea of copyright is based on 3 ideas:
- creativity is scarce;
- creating requires time people don't have;
- distribution is expensive.
The first never was true. People will create. That's human nature.
The second... you're working what? 50 hours a week? That leaves you how much to do whatever you want to do?
The third is obsolete thanks to the 'net.
If there's any lesson the world at large should draw from the whole open source thing, it's that people *will* create *without compensation* because they just damn *feel* *like* *it* (re: Murphy's law for lab animals).
So it's time to ditch copyrights as we know them.
FTFH: Lessig Defends Free Culture in Keynote
If he's going to be defending "Free Culture," then shouldn't he really be doing it in Impress and not Keynote???
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
How much money would this culture cost the entertainment producers?
How can you monetize/calculate the revenue of your work released under "Creative Commons" or other licenses?
I am an entertainment producer. Its easy to make cheap copies of whatever (CD/DVD/download) you are selling. So one cannot determine the loss of revenue if you release your work under a "Creative Commons" license.
I dont put any type of restrictions on the DVDs (there is an FBI warning, but who takes it seriously) I sell. Instead I tell my customers I trust their judgement.
Tat Tvam Asi
Well if we're going to remove artificially create rights and restrictions we also need to get rid of most laws. Or are you being hypocritical? Why do YOU have a monopoly on your property? I should be able to take whatever I want, sure you can stop me or try to but I should be able to freely shoot you dead as well.
You're missing the point. Copyright did not start out to be a mechanism for forcing people to pay for content every time they were exposed to it. The current incarnation is completely counter to its original purpose, and arguably no longer serves the public in a positive way.
Huh? By that reasoning all artificial rights are communism. Everything short of total anarchy is communism.
Forced distribution of resources dictated by the government is communism, capitalism lets the market dictate how they are distributed. By what definition is copyright capitalistic?
GPL: Free as in will
I'd be more sympathetic with copyright holders if they weren't such hypocrites. Much of modern copyright issues can be traced to the Disney corporation. Extensions on copyright are directly linked to the expiration of copyright on Mickey Mouse.
Disney has made billions upon billions of dollars using the "intellectual property" of long dead authors. Do you really think Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio, or any of other stories that built the Disney empire were dreamed up by Disney themselves? That didn't stop them from using the material. Where was their concern for the "protection" of ideas back then?
Walt Disney is every bit as dead as Hans Christian Anderson, yet if I tried to sell a story about Mickey Mouse I'd have about one week before I found myself assaulted by Disney's legal department. Why is one protected and not the other?
The solution is not to make work on speculation; make it on commission.
We've become attached to the speculative/at-risk work model of art production, even though I'm not convinced that it's really all that beneficial to artists. It results in many more artists and much more art than the market really demands at any given time, and many more failures than would otherwise happen, if artists waited for a demand to exist, and then created for that demand, rather than the other way around.
If you are a sculptor, and someone pays you to make a sculpture, then you negotiate a price for your time based on how long it will take you to make the sculpture, and how much energy you're going to put into it. At the end of the time, they get the sculpture, and you move on to a new project. You get paid for your labor, they get a product.
The idea that someone should be able to create something and then derive income from it, over and over and over, for hundreds of years, is a very new economic invention. Ultimately, as technology improves and the cost of reproduction becomes less and less, and the stopgap methods we use to make reproduction artificially expensive fail, both the cost and the value of the marginal copy fall to zero. The only things which have any value, are those which actually take skilled work to create. In other words, only unique works of art, new originals, are valuable when you have a world full of cheap copies.
This means that there will always be a demand for artistic output. Even with the entire recorded output of human society on tap, people will want new stuff created. Rather than trying to monetize things which have already been created, artists need to concentrate on getting the value of their time paid for up front; rather than trying to amortize the cost of creation over multiple copies, demand that payment in advance.
A large problem, however, is that the market for "art" is significantly smaller than the people currently trying to make a living producing it. There simply isn't room for that much of an industry; right now they only exist by selling copies -- things that have little or no inherent value, because they take little labor to produce. A transition to a more sustainable model would necessarily involve a fairly ugly "contraction" period. However this is a necessary consequence of the elimination of the parasitic industry which currently flourishes by selling things whose value in labor terms is fictitious and based on artificial scarcity.
Skilled labor has value, copies don't. That's really the future; any model that attempts to impose a value on a copy which can be made by a machine in a few seconds, has to either depend on a monopoly (control of the means of production), or is eventually bound to fail.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Mr Card is absolutely wrong. You do not have to defend your copyright, only your trademarks. If any of these characters is trademarked, then he has to act in every case where he becomes aware of infringment. See the recent posts about Google trying to stop people using their name as a verb.
:(
Trademarks must be defended. Patents and copyrights don't.
Interesting to see that OSC would sue over something he obviously doesn't understand. Hopefully his lawyers would stop him.
It's also interesting to see an artist crave that life + 70 year bullshit. He seems more interested in leaving his family money than in contributing to the shared culture of the world. Sad... I expected more of him
You have a sad view of the world, that you think artists have some sort of ultimate right over how people view their work. Artists can expect a certain moral right that people will not plagiarize their works, but an idea is an idea. If I tell you an idea, I don't have any right to control what you then do with that idea. If I don't want you to misinterpret my idea, my sole recourse is to not tell you in the first place. (Particularly, if you're selling a work in exchange for money, you've just sold something. You should no longer expect to have complete control. If you want complete control, don't sell it.)
Derivative works happen all the time, especially for works in the public domain. Disney makes cartoons based on classic fairy tales (Snow White, Cinderella, etc). Should they need permission from the Grimms Brothers estate, because they may not be preserving their artisitic vision? "Clueless" is basically an updated "Emma". Do you think Jane Austen is rolling over in her grave? Some works are not out of copyright, and have attracted lawsuits, like "The Wind Done Gone" vs. "Gone With The Wind". Should Leonardo DaVinci's descendants have the right to complain about the Mona Lisa's frame? Should MAD Magazine be banned, since a parody (a form of derivative work) may convince me that some subpar movie just isn't worth watching?
Luckily, copyright in the US is not intended to protect any sort of "creative right". We can only hope it never will.
The creator of a work has the right to ensure that that work is only seen in a form which the creator approves of.
So, how does the fact that all rights are signed away to a record label or film studio impact this? The "rights of the artist" seems to be a fallacy that the holders of copyrights use to motivate widening and extension of copyright.
What happens if the copyright holder and the original creator of a work disagree on whether someone can create a derivative work? The artist has a right to decide how his work is seen? No.
The creator of a work has no rights. The copyright holder does. These two are seldom the same.