Wendy Grossman learns how to save the read-write culture

Lawrence Lessig (2008), Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, Avery Publishing (The Penguin Press, USA)

They say perspectives change when you have kids. Stanford Law Professor and Creative Commons co-founder Lawrence Lessig’s two sons are at least part of the driving force behind Remix, his fourth book, his third specifically about the copyright wars. He doesn’t, he says, want behaviours natural to his children's generation to be criminalised.

If you have ever taken a photo you’ve found and composited it with another, or posted a video clip of your two-year-old dancing to nearly inaudible commercial music to YouTube, or written a short bit of fiction using characters from your favourite TV show, you’ll understand what he means. If you haven’t done any of these things, your children or your children’s children will. Do you want them to grow up with contempt for the law?

Costs of copyright

Remix is not the rehash of Lessig’s previous books that the title might lead you to expect. They (The Future of Ideas, Free Culture and Code 2.0) dealt with various aspects of computer networks, copyright law and technology architecture. Remix is about the collateral damage of the copyright wars. How much, Lessig asks, are these really costing?

The cost includes criminalising a generation. But also, Lessig argues, we lose the very thing that today’s technology makes possible: creative culture at all levels. Yesterday’s passive consuming culture (watching TV, listening to recorded music) was ‘read-only’; today’s technology enables ‘read-write’ (RW) culture, in which everyone can participate as creators, even if only as amateurs. Rightsholders have more direct financial interests, and about a third of the book is a look at the three types of economies – commercial, sharing, and hybrid – that surround intellectual property on the Net.

Five changes

Lessig concludes by proposing five changes to the law intended both to encourage RW culture and to preserve the viability of commercial economies: exempt non¬commercial use; require copyright owners to re-register works after 14 years; simplify the law regarding fair use; regulate uses of copyrighted material, not copies; decriminalise file-sharing.  
 
Working from last to first, the reason to decriminalise file-sharing is simple: fighting it is about as successful as the war on drugs. Ten years of law suits, shuttered sites and services, and court cases have utterly failed to shut down file-sharing. There is absolutely no question that not only are there far more ways to share files than there were a decade ago, but that the range of material freely, if illegally, available online has vastly increased. Lessig suggests adopting either a tax on Internet use or individual subscriptions to compensate artists.

Regulating uses rather than copies also makes sense. For example, every time I view a web page on my computer I’m making a copy of it, however temporarily; it would be nonsense to charge users for that copy (although Europe at one time considered it). ‘Copying,’ Lessig writes, ‘is as common as breathing.’ Instead, charge for commercial uses. Most artists would agree with this: if there's money to be made from their work, they want some of it.

Re-registration

Requiring re-registration is meant to speed the entry of works without commercial value into the public domain. One of the consequences of the current default, that all work is copyrighted from the moment of creation until 70 years after the author's death, is that it takes a century or more for new work to enter the public domain. The vast majority of material does not retain commercial value for that long; re-registration would ensure that only commercially valuable work would remain protected.

Under such a regime, artists, creators, and rightsholders would still have their period of protected monopoly in which to profit from their work. JK Rowling renews her copyright after 14 years and continues to pull in £5 a second. But the mother posting the video of her two-year-old dancing to a garbled Prince song doesn't get sued.

In the end, Lessig blames the useless and damaging copyright wars on the simple fact that kids don’t have as much money to fund political campaigns as Hollywood does. Neat segue into his next project, announced early this year: ending corruption in Congress by getting rid of ‘earmarks’ (special interest funding). The story continues at www.change-congress.org.

Lawrence Lessig’s web page is at www.lessig.org

Wendy Grossman is a freelance writer on technology