Lessig – Free Culture – Talk and Chapters
Free Culture, Full Text: Listen to it here.
From Lessig’s talk at Oscon and the first thirty pages of his book, we can define free culture as well as identify the main points of his argument.
Free culture (more akin to free markets rather than free beer) is the opposite of permission culture. It supports creators and innovators, but also allows future innovators to build on past works without the hindrance of past creators. Free culture gives rightful value to the ideas and creators of those ideas. If a work or an idea is truly valuable, it will become a part of a foundation upon which other thinkers and creators should be able to build. Permission culture is essentially a large group of people who each have their own brick but refuse to come together to make a house. They might get rained on, but at least they’ve maintained claim over their own bricks.
Lessig states in Free Culture that the law is altering the way culture gets made (xv). The commercial culture umbrella is growing by the day, and the transmission of ideas is being regulated to the point of inconvenience and inaccessibility, and in some cases is being stopped altogether. The Internet was beginning to bridge the gap, and industries whose dollars depend on regulated material began to sweat furiously, making the rash decision to overregulate the uncharted terrain of the Web in order to head off their own demise. Lessig says we’ve become a permission culture rather than a free one.
Before the Internet and all its regulation crises, there was the shift in radio programming. Lessig talks about the development of FM radio, how the quality and scope of broadcast outshined AM’s capabilities by far, but a combination of corporate fear, bureaucracy, and money delayed its inevitable rise to popularity. An important detail to point out in this case is that this was essentially one man, Edwin Armstrong, was fighting all of the opponents of this new technology, and while he as an individual crumbled, we as a population of users have much greater power and need to use it.
Lessig makes an important point in his discussion of the Causbys – we must distinguish what can be labeled private property as well as what should be labeled piracy, and our main gauge of this should be our own common sense. The Douglas statement can be generalized and applied to current disputes over property rights and still make sense:
“To recognize such private claims to [property] would clog these highways, seriously interfere with their control and development in the public interest, and transfer into private ownership that to which only the public has a just claim.” (Lessig 2)
But what is a just claim? As a creator of information which I plan to profit from, don’t I have a just claim in ensuring that others don’t reap my benefits? Or do I owe society that information if it will add to the pool of common knowledge and better our society?
Lessig talks about Disney’s rise to fame, giving a more detailed description of the way Walt and Co. freely used material that they repurposed, copyrighted, and now restrict completely. Even though Mickey Mouse belongs to our culture in the same way the Brothers Grimm does, we are forbidden from building upon the idea of Mickey in the way that Disney built an empire upon stories he did not write. The eleven extensions of the copyright protection term, appropriately deemed the Mickey Mouse protection act, show how government and business are both desperate to retain control over certain images and works as long as they can be used as commodities.
Much of this material is covered in his talk at Oscon. Lessig challenges all of us to look at what we’re supporting with our dollars, with our participation, and with our consent, and he urges us to stand up and do something about it.
Talk, shown in Lessig Method–
Refrain:
1) Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
In the beginning, free culture was our birth. Lessig says that in 1790, when “free culture was carried to America,” we were able to create a “regime that left creativity unregulated.” And it stayed unregulated until Disney decided they didn’t want to be a cultural building block. Fast forward, and we have eleven extensions of copyright term of protection – the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act,” per Lessig (Transcript p. 1). Out went public domain. Culture is now a commodity to be owned.
2) The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
Lessig discusses the expansion of not only the term for which a work is covered, but also the extent to which a work is covered by copyright protection. He notes that in the beginning, only the work was protected, but that expanded into copies, then derivatives, and the time limits for coverage expanded with the definition of property.
3) Free Societies enable the future by limiting the past.
Lessig says that the solution is to have transparent creativity. In this system of mass regulation of creativity, we have to be active in sharing, in using shared materials, in adding to the common knowledge base. Our opportunities to do this are shrinking, and we have to maintain these common places for as long as possible.
4) Ours is less and less a free society.
Lessig identifies the two biggest threats that he sees to innovation and creativity as means of cultural development: the past creators (those who are threatened by future users, who support the outdated patent system) or the power-hungry forces who desire control over future innovations. Lessig says that if we continue to do nothing, continue to allow outdated rules to be used to govern a new terrain, our ability to progress, to create, and to innovate will be regulated out of existence.
Lessig isn’t just philosophizing about these ideas; he’s acting on them. As the founder of Creative Commons, he created a home for common knowledge. With over 130 million licensed works, the site is becoming a more familiar resource, and as people continue to add to it, it will only grow in value and better reflect our culture at this point in time. He also asks people to go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to look into reviving orphan works, and to engage with state policy makers regarding these issues.