This morning I once again attended the Stanford Breakfast Briefing, this time featuring Lawrence Lessig, probably one of the best talks I’ve ever seen. He truly managed to capture his audience with a show packed with thought-provoking points and messages, stressed by images, graphics, amazing video-clips, all resulting in a very vivid depiction of “How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity”.
What he described was the transition taking place in the internet, where we are moving away from the socalled: ‘Read-Only’ culture, heading towards the ‘Read-Write’ culture, which he also labelled the re-mixing culture, because it very much is about manipulating or altering existing content, and in that process generating new content.
The problem however, according to Lessig, is the way in which this transition is being fought by existing media. Lessig, a laywer himself, points to the problems arising from this war between the Read-Write and the Read-Only, what he labels the copyright war, led by lawyers and big media, and which may end up killing off the Read-Write culture entirely. According to Lessig, we need to recognize that copyright is old-fashioned, and we need to reform the law to prevent our children from being raised as criminals, being the loosers in the proclaimed war on ‘piracy’.
Lessig described the process as a process of ‘copy and change’, which is an important and inherent part of being human, that is how we learn. And we have always been used to using text in this way, as something we could use to make quotes, something that I - as a researcher - make extensive use of. that is part of how I build new theory (if I will eventually succeed in that ,-D). But how come we cannot quite music, images and graphic in the same way?
Lessing presented some fascinating examples of this up-and coming re-mixing culture, which is illegal according to existing copyright law, but which make some powerful statements. For instance the way in which children compose their own AMVs (Anime music videos), by re-mixing music with animation to create both funny and highly impressive new music videos. A trend that started in Japan, but which is now spreading to the rest of the world at an accelerating speed.
Make sure you have a look, this is really interesting stuff and none the least good examples of how the Internet is a chaning, being democratized and moving away from just a means for buying and consumption, to instead being a palce for collaration, creation and sharing.
In his battle against the copyright conservatives, a few years back he established the non-profit organisation: Creative Commons, which provide artists with licenses allowing others to make use of the material. A GREAT initiative, and right then and there I therefore decided to see what I can to obtain a CC license for my dissertation, once it is done ;.D. Please visit their website, they have important stuff to convey.....
