kthread reads: remix
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig
rating: 3 of 5 stars
Larry Lessig beckons us in his new book, Remix, to think about the future of a generation weaned on pirated media. In his usual elegant style, he clears the bramble around thorny issues of gift economies, fan labor (though he doesn’t use the term), and what he calls the “Copyright Wars.” (Here’s video of the author reading the book’s introduction.)
If you regularly read books in this genre you will recognize many of these examples; accordingly, Lessig works to reinvigorate the Potter Wars anecdote by focusing Warner Bros.’s continued waffle acknowledging profit margins from fan sites dedicated to Harry, Hermione, and the Weasley brood.
The young creator network that fought in the Potter War skirmishes are part of Lessig’s most interesting argument: deregulating amateur creativity. The distilled argument begins chapter nine—the chapter that will appear on syllabi and circulate online (especially as it’s a list, which bodes well for bookmark-sharing site Digg, and a list that ends with decriminalizing filesharing, a topic dear to Digg users)—and Lessig defines amateur creativity as different from professional creativity. A silly family video would be the former, the remix artist GirlTalk the latter, and he proposes flipping the model so a site host like YouTube absorbs responsibility for copyright fees in uploaded files instead of the user. Sexy, though I’m not convinced Big Brother aspires to be Daddy Warbucks.
Think of Clay Shirky’s work on cognitive surpus and how he argues it was masked for decades (“Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up.”) and about how Shirky argues that the internet runs on love. Lessig teases out some (he could go further) of the legal usage implications of these production/consumption patterns–ceding that money pollutes gift economies, but pointing out absurd “user-generated content” sites for commercial entities like the Star Wars franchise that own the remixed fan products added to the “community” site.
On page 248 of Remix, he writes “the agreement between media companies, or media companies and artists, are not love letters. They do not express mutual respect.” Lessig is not a copyright abolitionist–the movement concerns him greatly; neither does he promote filesharing (he responded to a filesharing question last night in this way). Respect for the laws governing copyright will work, he suggests, when the laws reflect the current culture (read his distinction between thin-sharing and thick-sharing). Without alteration, the regulations will continue to be ignored and this disregard may bleed into other areas of regulation, a dangerous trend for an entire generation.
At an event last night near Los Angeles, Lessig spoke on protecting use of amateur performance and the dangers of read-only societies:
And speaking of silly family videos, last week I posted a Thanksgiving dance clip, a Taylor tradition we now share with friends by posting online. As the cruise director of this particular family activity that was destined for YouTube, I made sure we used a remix of a Jackson 5 song, one I like better than the original, spun by a Japanese DJ.
We researched the original choreography on YouTube–the 1972 head bobs, the 1977 spinning Spaceship Earth moves. And instead of dubbing over, I left our voices and the scuffles of our shoes, adding a layer that adds value for the audience of this video: the small circle of family and friends who enjoy watching five white kids wear Afro wigs and dance around the garage.
I agree with Lessig that trying to live without the love of amateur remixers in an online world filled with video will be one long sleepless night. Let’s hope the new copyright czar will know wrong from right.
View all my GoodReads reviews.
More Lessig on admins exercising judgment on video-sharing sites.
Related posts:
Leave a Reply
Posted by Kristen Taylor on Saturday, December 6th, 2008, 8:43 pm * Filed in Books, Design. * Tags: Books, lessig, reads, remix. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
