In Response to: "How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law" by Lawrence Lessig

A nice summary of the ideas in article in speech form by the author itself here.

In this article, Lessig explores the relationship between copyright laws & creativity and urges for copyright reform. Lessig compares remixing to writing in his argument, stating that the protocol for legally “remixing” in writing - citing other sources - is not replicated for legally remixing digital media. I believe that his argument is sound. With new developments in technology, remixing is getting easier and easier. Just as a person with pen and paper can write, a person with access to the Internet can remix. Consider the song “The Fox” by Ylvis released two weeks ago. The search query “what does the fox say” on Youtube returns over three million results - many of which are remixes of the original song and music video in some form. However, the current state of copyright laws makes it so that a person can not produce content using existing content as easily as he or she can write something that incorporates other written works.

We can not expect laws that were written in the absence of the technologies that dominate our lives today to swiftly transfer over. Copyright laws provide producers legal security in the ownership of their intellectual property. They fit seamlessly into a read-only culture, in which there is a fine division between content consumers and producers. However, the Internet is blurring this line and slowly rediscovering a read-write culture, one in which individuals are not only consumers but also producers. Changes in copyright laws have to be made in order to accommodate for our new culture, but the how isn’t so obvious. In order to begin thinking about the how, we should consider a few questions: Are remixed works considered original? Are remixers considered producers?

The discrepancy between remix culture and copyright laws is analogous to developments in technology. Consider the new iOS7 software upgrade. If an app developer decides to not upgrade his or her application so that it is compatible with the new operating system, that application will lose its following. Users could still use this application if they chose to stick with an older operating system. However, many users will choose to upgrade if they find it to be more exciting and beneficial than the usage of that single, stubborn application. I feel that, currently, copyright law is the stubborn single application and remix culture its fun, exciting counterpart. This extinction timeline infographic predicts that copyright will become extinct in 2020. Lessig raises this concern in his article, suggesting that, without change, copyright law will create a culture of criminals. Such a culture could be detrimental to our law-governing society; if breaking laws becomes commonplace, how can we be sure that people won’t break laws more severe than copyright laws?

The remix culture of our present is not a creature that can be tamed by the copyright laws of the past.