Web 2.0: Lawrence Lessig
: He recalls slam a slam review of his last book from Fortune. “What did he do? What he did was to take my words, my creativity, with his own…” He calls the review a “right to remix without permission from anyone.”
“That world of text knows this freedom well… ” He goes beyond text to the gray album and a $218 movie that could have won Cannes and a Peanuts remix and political digital fun.
This is remix culture. “No longer just a broadcast democracy but a bottoms up democracy, no longer just a New York Times democracy but a blog democracy… This is the architecture of this form of creativity.”
He says the laws have “massively changed.” Before 78, copyright was opt-in; now it is opt-out.
He goes into the case of Greenwald and his attempt to get a clip of Bush from NBC and says it is made worse by media consolidation.
“I have no patience for people who file-share illegally,” he says. But he says we go overboard in trying to deal with that, teaching children to remix Shakespeare but not Lucas.
Lessig is, as I’ve long been told, incredibly impressive at this. He is compelling and convincing. But I still want someone smarter than me to spar with him to cut through some of the rhetorical flash and demonizing to hear the other side that does exist and to get closer to solutions. I’m very impressed with Lessig. He is swaying me on the need to protect remixing (though I disagree with the assumption that all creativity depends on remixing). But there is also a need to protect owners of creation. I want to hear both sides together. Debate is more informative than lecture, even if it is from the PowerPoint impressario.
