Join Open Rights Group, get a signed copy of Lessig's new book REMIX
Glyn sez, "Lawrence Lessig, pre-eminent cyberlaw scholar and the grand wizard of Creative Commons, releases his new book this Autumn and if you want a free signed copy read on. The book is called Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy and will be his last on intellectual property in the digital age. It pursues three key themes:
"(1) that this war on our kids has got to stop,
"(2) that we need to celebrate (and support) the rebirth of a remix culture, and
"(3) that a new form of business (what I call the "hybrid") will flourish as we better enable this remix creativity.
The next five people who sign up to support the Open Righs Group and include "Larry's the Daddy" in the 'how did you hear about' field will receive a signed copy of Remix."
Support ORG
the latest
latest episodes
I risk being off topic with this, so edit me out if it's a bad tangent. I'm wondering what Lessig would say about today's ruling by a US judge that A.J. Rowling can prevent the Harry Potter Lexicon from being published. The Judge said it was not fair use and could harm Ms. Rowling. Dear Gawd, she's made a billion dollars! How could she be harmed? I wonder if the author is interested in just making the Lexicon available on the web for free.
#1: "Dear Gawd, she's made a billion dollars! How could she be harmed?"
It doesn't matter what money her other projects have made - this Lexicon is in direct competition with Rowling's own work filling a similar role. There's no exception in the Copyright laws stating "... unless you've already made a zillion dollars. If you've already made a zillion dollars, everything you did or will ever do is public domain."
#1: "I wonder if the author is interested in just making the Lexicon available on the web for free."
It IS a website - the whole project started as a website, and then he tried to sell a book made from it.
Dear Gawd, she's made a billion dollars! How could she be harmed?
-------
This is the kind of ignorance that authors are up against when these groups astroturf for the consumer electronics industry that needs low-cost or free music, books, video to survive.
Gee I dunno, why do YOU think an independent judge ruled this way?
I am not sure that we need to celebrate remix culture as Lessig suggests. It's creative and let's say through sampling people can create their own songs, but so what? People can and do create their own songs every day by playing instruments and not cutting and pasting someone else's stuff. If you have to make a movie by using someone else's footage then that's someone's way of telling you to take your camera outside and DIY!
I've got a dozen appropriate and totally inappropriate comparisons and contrasts that can prove these concepts pretty strange.
Let's look at an inappropriate comparison: the Free Love movement circa 1966-67. In that movement people decided to throw off the shackles of 1950s neo-Victorianism and embrace people on their own terms. What could be the fallout from that?
Well, I have met the fallout from that and it included kids in my elementary school our age who were 1 or 2 grades behind us because they were born to a single mother via a free love incident, had no paternal support, and spent several years of their lives in not very intellectual settings so that by the time grandma took over in 1975 that 7 year old may have seen some wild bands, but they didn't know how to read yet. Then free love and structures surrounding the free love system enabled AIDS to gain a foothold in bathhouses, killing thousands.
So, was 1950s culture stultifying? Yes. Was Free Love the answer? No. Thus in 2008 Free Love has fallen by the wayside as a cultural movement.
Is Free culture the answer? What would make you think that people will still create music once it's been devalued to the level it has with all of the creative industries roundly mocked in forums like Boing Boing? I mean, no one in their right mind calls this a "war on kids." That's lunacy that should be roundly ignored by reasonable people. Get freaking real here. I call free culture an astroturf campaign by the Consumer Electronics Association because the main people who benefit are Apple Lawyers and people bent on making IT companies a monopoly and eliminating Tower Records and other companies from the marketplace. Don't act like you don't know which way the wind blows and what lawyers are making when the devices sell for hundreds of dollars to play songs people downloaded for free...
"Gee I dunno, why do YOU think an independent judge ruled this way?"
Hs dghtr s hg Hrry Pttr fn? t th nly rsnbl xplntn.
As an academic, I find the ruling horrifying. Many academic works resemble the Harry Potter Lexicon, and I worry about the implications this ruling may have. What type of world will we have when academics and journalists need a copyright holder's permission to do their jobs?
Neerner, aren't you interested in the New Culture? Do you think writers can pump their ideas out and alter the minds of their readers and than not allow those readers to use those memes? If you want to be a creator of ideas and a cultural influencer, then don't expect to control all those ideas once you've set them free. R.J. Rowling is acting like a spoiled brat. She needs to just sit back and see what blooms from the millions of seeds she's set upon the wind.
Sadmarvin, I'm really just interested in the "harm" she was going to be caused. What real harm? So let her write her own lexicon. I think she's like George Lucas greedy. More more more...
Jeff,
Jo Rowling is one of the most active philanthropists on earth. Her two HP textbooks alone made $30 million for Comic Relief UK. She has encouraged many authors to write books about her books and has supported her fan sites far more than she's supported any conventional media. Get off her case. Steve Vander Ark was just cutting and pasting her work into an encyclopedia for his own profit.
When are you going to get over this obsession with the financial affairs of successful writers?
See... there's the George Lucas thing...
I think there's a pretty distinctive line between tribute and leech. I have a lot of friends in music and I've run across very strange things. Back around 1990, A friend of mine had to send multiple letters to this girl who was putting out a "best of" cassette that she was selling out of a "distro" where she'd buy records and transfer them to cassettes she'd sell at her school as a tribute to her favorite bands and as a way to promote them. It was mindbogglingly confusing and I read her letters, she was embarrassed and angry that a band she liked wouldn't want her to make these handmade "best of" cassettes and sell them. and my friend had to be really careful not to really piss her off, but he really wanted her to channel her energy into her OWN band or her OWN projects and not repackage his stuff. And even if she gave the cassettes away, at what point can a band ask someone this organized to please just back away and let us be who we are without you butting in and not getting a life.
The very first day I got napster I typed in my future wife's roommate's name into it and I found a bunch of mp3 out there under a directory called "uglyb*tchmusic." And I don't know what the hell that was supposed to mean, but there isn't anyone here who can tell me that someone was sharing her music because they respected her. That directory MIGHT have been funny to someone, but it wasn't funny to me, it was offensive to me and my friend's music shouldn't have been in that directory and I realized on that first day how bands totally lost control of themselves and their lives and images on the web.
And as soon as Metallica fired back against these so-called fans they got totally blasted, parodied and mocked.
So recently I was at a fan convention and there was a group of people there with these intensely detailed 4 and 8 foot models and I asked them what they were models of and they started telling me this story about this future universe they were creating that was half sci fi book and half game and how they not only made lego models, they made Quake levels and other crap like that. I realized how even though their ideas weren't very well thought out and were kind of lame, they were totally original and all those people with battlestar galactica and star wars models were like, fine and cool in their own way, that these people who used modelbuilding to work their way into making videogame levels were really doing something much more.
So I think the fan universe needs to think a lot about the difference between fan and leech because I don't think they're being very thoughtful about it and I'm finding that this summer was a turning point where for years people thought filesharing was cool, now they realize that their favorite bands either aren't touring in the US or not putting out records and they're wondering where the new ideas are coming from and I think we all know that bands get abused too much for them to continue to give away the majority of their mp3s AND still pay for their van to get from Boston to Ohio on $4 per gallon gas.
To make it clear, I think the culture has reached a tipping point where "free culture" or "copyfight" concepts have been proven to not have legs for the future and have contributed to too many unintended consequences for the concepts to continue. It's all over for these ideas.
Neener. I've never paid for a webcomic, and many of them have been running for years under "free culture" and "copyfight" concepts. Indeed, isn't that just the way that BB works?
@SadMarvin: From what I saw of the site (before it went down) and the book, it did not substantially add to the HP books and regurgitated an awful lot which is what I believe was the issue it lost on. The couple of times I needed to look something up, I have to write that I was left bemused. But hey, that could just have been me...
@Neener: If somebody cares enough to want to share and remix culture (be it thoughtfully or not), why is that not worth preserving or encouraging? You write "too many unintended consequences": well yes, that is bound to happen and keep happening whilst this is being thrashed out and various paradigms are challenged. I really hope that we can create a thoughtful Remix culture which adds to the work rather than just copies it.
To put one hat on, I participate with the Open Knowledge Foundation on the Open Shakespeare/Milton project to build a free framework which allows the user to begin reusing and (in time) remixing Shakespeare and Milton to either learn or goof around with. I've no idea how it will be used but I hope to be surprised and that both authors can be made relevant to a different audience through participation, remix and reuse.
Jeff @1:
Come off it, Jeff. You're threadjacking and you know it. Furthermore, you jumped in with the very first comment in the thread, so to get rid of the tangent I'd have to remove half of the comments that follow yours. Your penance is to post some thoughtful remarks about remixing, and to get chewed out about the folly of your obsession with commercially successful authors.You think writing is about the money? Are you crazy? Do you have any idea how little most writers make, and how uncertain even that pittance is? At this very moment, there are award-winning authors out there whose entire backlist has gone out of print. There are authors who've had bestsellers but are now living on Rice-a-Roni and canned soup. Rowling is a wild anomaly. For almost everyone else, writing is such an unpredictable trade that a second career in acting would be a more regular source of income.I swear, everybody thinks they're going to be Harold Robbins. He was a creature of his time and place. It wouldn't work that way now.
As to how Ms. Rowling could be harmed: it's her writing. There's a profound and intimate relationship between authors and their work. Having it misused can grieve them beyond anything you can imagine.
Neener @3:
No. Open Source and Open Rights groups neither shill nor astroturf for the consumer electronics industry. The consumer electronics industry doesn't need specific cheap content. All they need are customers who want their devices' capabilities.Because Rowling was fractionally more correct than the defendant. The decision, which made that distinction clear, falls well within existing publishing law. The central point all along has been that Steven Vander Ark copied too much of Rowling's own writing verbatim.That's not the point.First, art has always made reference to other art. Where's the bright line separating a book that refers to and quotes other written works, and a musical composition that incorporates sampled quotes from other recordings? Second, shooting raw footage is not the same thing as making movies. Have you seen any of the remixed trailers that take a famous movie and transpose it into another genre? That's creative work.Where in ghod's name have you been getting your social history? This is a bizarrely inaccurate account of a complex series of social changes whose roots reach back into the previous century. For instance: 1950s neo-Victorianism? In all the years since Vicky packed it in, there's scarcely been a less Victorian period than the 1950s. Neo-Victorianism didn't get started until the 60s, though it's been perking along ever since.There were kids like that in my grade school, too, conceived around the beginning of the 1950s. From everything I've heard, there were kids like that in my parents' elementary schools as well.Oh, for pete's sake. Free love? The Pill.You were a right little snob in elementary school, weren't you? Divorce, single parenthood, poverty, and household disorder correlate with low income, illness, poor education and job skills, and the kind of mental and emotional problems you get when the parents themselves grew up in hard nasty circumstances. It's unfortunate. It's why programs like Head Start are such a good idea, and save so much money later on. It is not a product of the media noticing their culture's ongoing social ferment in the 1960s.There was a singular lack of toddlers at those shows. You might get a few kids at a summer music festival, but that was it. They sure weren't letting people bring their kids into bars and clubs where smaller acts played.As I said earlier, that's unfortunate; but it doesn't have squat to do with the mother's notions of the proper relationship of sex to capitalism at the moment she conceived.System? Did you learn about the birds and the bees from the Rev. Wildmon? Not to mention you're conflating events in wildly different contexts taking place over a period of more than twenty years.Half a million dead to date. Three times that many infected.That oversimplification is so oversimplified as to be useless.You know, if you ever want to talk about this seriously, we can discuss the demonetarization of love and sex in our culture. Or were you under the impression that the "free" in "free love" just meant "unrestrained"? Not hardly. What a lot of you young whippersnappers don't understand is how much cleaner and more moral certain aspects of the whole free love thing were, compared to the social conventions they partially supplanted.Do you ever do any research before saying things like that?You have yet to identify the question, much less explain how historic shifts in American social mores relate to current copyright law.Who says it's been devalued? I don't think that's a claim you ought to make if you don't have some substantiation up your sleeve.Wrong. First, that's not an accurate description of what goes on here. Second, BB isn't mocking entire industries. Third, fans of art and music have demonstrated no lack of ability to distinguish between art and artists they love, and the industries in which those artists work. Fourth, if mockery devalued an entertainment industry's products, first-run movies would cost a dime.Sorry, I think my neck snapped going around that curve. When did this hypothetical "war on kids" come into the discussion?Guy, Tower Records took itself out of the marketplace. Don't blame us, or Apple, or Lawrence Lessig.TNH @12: Thank you!
TNH, awe-inspiring as always, but I did have a little chuckle at your expense.
From waaaaay above
heh, not often that I get to accuse a mod of only skimming over the article/summary. :)