Lawrence Lessig: Re-examining the remix
A few months ago, before the Digital Economy Bill was rammed through parliament, I wrote a post about a video by Julian Sanchez on remixing.
Now Lawrence Lessig has used that video to extend the argument for fair use and also to make a case for certain conservative values to cross over into liberal thought (in the American senses of ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’).
I had never considered these value differences to be as pertinent to the copyright debate as he demonstrates, but I think he makes a very good point. However, for me the fundamental issue is that the ‘creative industries’, especially in Hollywood, have been sufficiently rich and powerful to push their protectionist agenda until now, and are using their current (overstated?) financial difficulties to push it even further and to justify their actions by reinforcing the need to *maximise* the revenue from their creative assets above all other considerations. Umair Haque at the Harvard Business School has plently to say about this kind of behaviour in the economy in general, but Umair seems to think that ultimately these companies will reach the end of the line when the marginal costs they incur return to overwhelm them, and the corporations either radically change their strategy or disaggregate. Trouble is, it seems to me that the marginal costs to the creative industries is cultural poverty, so how exactly is that going to manifest itself when the creative industries themselves see their role as filling the void left behind? Will it be when they can’t find anyone with any creative talent anymore? I don’t think so. So how will a generation be able to coordinate around a radical slogal along the lines of: “We demand change because we are culturally empoverished and are unable to participate in new forms of social creation that we can’t actually imagine anyway because we have not been allowed to experiment!”
Personally, I think it’s about time the economists wade in, because, by god, having spent a depressing lunchtime in a ‘bootlaw’ workshop on copyright last week, there seems little point relying on the lawyers…
