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August 19, 2009
In Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons edited by Brian Fitzgerald brings together papers on a conference on the internet, law and the importance of open content licensing in the digital age. It can be accessed here on the creative commons and offers insight into what is emerging through blogging and Flickr.
One of the papers ---The Vision for the Creative Commons: What are We and Where are We Headed? Free Culture is given by Lawrence Lessig, says that we have just ended 80 years where culture is broadcast to us. Our experience of it is that we consume it. This culture is made somewhere else, and we passively consume it. The good in culture on this model is more channels.
In a digital economy, by contrast, there is the emergence of a cut and paste culture---an active process of remaking and remixing culture, for that is what we doing with our digital technology. Lessig says:
In the context of music, the Beatles created this amazing album The White Album, which of course inspired Jay-Z to create this album, The Black Album, which then in the expression of what remix is today, inspired this guy, DJ Danger Mouse, to create The Grey Album, which synthesises tracks from The White Album and The Black Album together to produce something different.
This is quite different from piracy, which has given rise to the barbed wire fence of intellectual property protections that protect copyrighted work but in the process kill this potential for remix. He says:
You cannot take a film class and invite the children to take the work of George Lucas and mix it together with Hitchcock and produce a demonstration of how the work of these two film makers worked and interacted. You cannot do that because that is called piracy under the regime of understanding that exists in intellectual property law today. We cannot begin to teach this literacy in our schools, so the capacity, the potential, is destroyed because we call it illegal. That is the critical point.
Digital rights management technology is being mandated by the law to be incorporated in every feature of this network, so that the permission to engage in these acts of creative remixing needs to be sought from the content owner, and guess what? Their permission will not be granted.
The settlement is that we have strong digital rights management through all of our content, but a liberal quote ‘fair use policy’, where by fair use we mean we get to make 3 or 4 free copies.If you buy this content, you get to make whatever number of free copies but those copies live only within the home. What remix culture needs is not the freedom to remix within your home; that is not what you need; you need the freedom to remix and to express it to others – the freedom which our tradition guaranteed to us when it came to text.
We need to find a way to use IP to enable free culture. That is the aim of creative commons – to find a simple way to mark content with the freedoms that the author intends the content to carry, so that when you encounter such free content, you know what you are allowed to do consistent with the law.We need to find a way to make the freedoms understandable, unchallengeable and usable in a digital age – understandable by ordinary people, unchallengeable by lawyers, and usable by computers.
The aim is to bring IP into the 21st century, to make remixing writing, image making and music etc legal in the 21st century. Technologists have given us a way to write. The lawyers have told us that way is illegal today. Hence the idea of the creative commons.
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