Having studied piracy and copyright last year as part of a communications subject, I was introduced to the work of Lawrence Lessig. I referred to Lessig’s book Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity quite extensively for my final essay, as I found that it was quite captivating to read and that he presented a number of ideas that I agreed with. When we approached the idea of copyright again for this course, I decided to look into some of Lessig’s other works and found this TED Talk.
In this talk, Lessig speaks of an amateur culture of user-generated content, where people produce content for the love of what they’re doing, not for money. He makes the distinction between remix and piracy, noting that when people remix, they take the original content and recreate it, using digital technologies, to say things differently.
He criticises the application of copyright law to this remix culture and cites the need for common sense. He offers the a solution, claiming that the following two things need to happen:
1. Artists and creators embrace the idea that their work be made available more freely, for amateur use but not commercial use.
2. Businesses who are building out this read-write culture embrace this opportunity and enable it, so that it continues to grow.
This is where creative commons comes in, as artists can determine how they want to allow their work to be used.
