This TEDTalk by Larry Lessig, was interesting in the fact that he pointed out how the new creativity, social creativity, is bringing people together, mimicking the “good ol’ days” of sitting on the front porch socializing with family, friends and neighbors. Taking content that already exists and collaboratively or solely reorganizing that content into a new work. He points out that these works are of amateurs, but not amateurish, meaning that the creators prefer to offer this quality content free of charge for the love of creating, and not for the love of profit.
User generated content is taking the online world by storm, reflecting how the younger generation processes what’s going on in the worlds around them; either current events, humor, or just to say things differently. User generated content is not using new techniques, it’s just more widely available; give a kid a $1,000.00 computer and some inspiration, and they will produce the rest. These are not acts of piracy, they are acts of creativity.
Copyright laws, however, are trying to squelch this movement, and suppress user generated content by imposing regulations on how, when and where this content can be posted and how users can produce this content. Lessig’s mission is to overcome these hurdles, to nurture user generated content by developing the Creative Commons. Creative Commons allows for people to share content they have produced for others to use freely to produce their own content. This in turn is creating a new movement of togetherness both of the creators and the consumers. We are once again becoming an engaged world, instead of passively watching content that is produced by those who can tell us what is entertaining, we as consumers can choose what it entertaining and if we don’t find anything to our liking, then we have the choice to produce content of our own.
In this second TEDTalk, Re-examining the remix,
Lessig discusses what Democrats can learn about copyright law from the Republicans, particularly the conservative Republicans. My first impression about this video was “Wow, he lost a lot of weight in three years!”, secondly, I was surprised by his message. Normally you think of Democrats as the liberal, the open minded, however, Lessig points out that it is the Democrats that fervently support the copyright laws which would classify the re-mix culture as piracy. Lessig uses a video analysis by Julian Sanchez about Remix Culture.
Sanchez points out that these remixes serves as something that feels familiar and people can relate to them, resulting in a social creativity that changes the way in which we relate to each other. Sanchez makes the overall point of how copyright law is essentially dictating what level of control we sacrifice over our social realities. Lessig takes it a little further, “Freedom needs this opportunityto both have the commercial successof the great commercial worksand the opportunityto build this different kind of culture.And for that to happen, you needideas like fair use to be central and protected,to enable this kind of innovation,as this libertarian tells us,between these two creative cultures,a commercial and a sharing culture.” Lessig is trying to convey that we need to learn a culture of openness in creativity, through fair-use, a ‘some-rights-reserved’ rather than an ‘all-rights-reserved’ environment, which fosters expression while still respecting the rights of the creator.
I think that these are very important lessons that we as consumers and creators need to take very seriously. It is part of the transparency that we accept as members of the web community, or any community really. In order to be an active, contributing, productive member of any community one must be at least a little transparent, without transparency, there is no trust and without trust we have no community.
Musings of an MILS student 