Talk:Creative Commons

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Is Lawrence Lessig radical enough?

(An unfair footnote)

Anon95869816 10:27, 13 May 2005 (GMT)

[intro]

In countless inspiring talks and books, Prof. Lawrence Lessig has pointed out an obvious problem with the copyright regimes in the USA (which apply to varying extent to other countries as well). It boils down to the observation that using, producing and "remixing" culture is such an ubiquitous trait of humans copyright holders should not be able to obstruct it. Advances in technology, however, have turned the tools of the culture industry into the means of doing culture for anyone. People do not write poems any more, but create songs and images on their PC using bits and pieces found on the news, on music television or radio, from movies they saw on DVD, and so on. Now this new technology, as the old one, is heavily regulated by copyright, so doing culture itself suddenly has become something you need a lawyer for.

[fix]

Prof. Lessig's solution is to fix the legal system and adapt it to the new situation: Creative commons licences are using existing copyright in a way fertilized by the Copyleft movement of Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation to prohibit undesired uses of a work: The creator of a work can allow or disallow non-commercial or commercial replication, or distribution of modifications independently. The difference between the FSF approach and CCL is the concept of property: While the FSF uses it to disable it (which in my opinion is almost painfully elegant), Lessig considers it (and the culture market on which people are willing to trade culture) an important incentive to create culture in the first place.

The argument goes roughly thus: By establishing a market for CCL culture, remixing isn't generally illegal any more. Therefore, it is unnecessary (and harder to justify) to tear down the internet as we now it and replace it by a more sophisticated variant of broadcast TV; people can keep remixing and producing culture in a bottom-up fashion; and nobody gets hurt, as artists can still make a living.

[problems with the fix]

The first argument is certainly valid, and justifies all the effort and achievements of the CCL campaign: The existence of free content sustains the participative nature of the internet. However, I claim that the problem of outlaw culture will remain pressing as long as the concept of intellectual property remains unchallenged on a much more profound level.

How do people distinguish between CCL and non-CCL art? Great care has been taken to enable non-technicians to do this, but they still have to be aware of moving on highly regulated and extremely hostile ground, and they have to care. The assumption seems to be that a funny video clip is created in a very planned way: First, the intention of producing a piece of culture causes a person to sit down and start thinking.

Then, she starts collecting material, taking great care to use only material that fits her budget and licencing intentions. Finally, she adds her own contribution and wraps it all up under the new licence. But in a non-professional setting, material for remix is not gathered from a cleanly annotated database but from memory. Bottom-up culture will never have the resources to get the legal situation sorted out, no matter how simple it is, as long as the raw material is gathered from a society in which any content at all is banned from remix. A way out may be to extensively widen the notion of fair use to safely cover any "oops, we didn't know that"-incident, but there is a slippery slope going down in two different directions, and this one seems to end where there is no more intellectual property.

My last point is that even CCL isn't safe: As an artist, you may very well disallow non-commerial distribution or modification, so even if I filter all non-CCL-content from my universe (which *may* be possible some day, but I cannot see how yet, as least as long as I am living in an urban environment), I still have to do extensive checking for every remix I make.

The only sound and consistent way to deal with culture in a world of ubiquitous communication and reproduction of information is to acknowledge the fact that communication and information is ubiquitous and uncontainable, and therefore cannot be owned in any traditional sense. This is no acid-head "you can't own, like, property"-talk, it simply strikes me as an obvious fact: Information is different from material goods. It cannot be owned.