Month: January 2005

I just listened to Lawrence Lessig on NPR’s show The Connection discussing the Creative Commons license and somewhat in support of “Free Culture” his book on how corporations control creativity. Here are my immediate lunch-hour thoughts which may be either quite pithy and brilliant or junk I will fully disavow by supper:

• I was happy to hear that generally he considered the control of collaboration to be an artists option which should be supported and that access and use without the permission of authors is extreme and unbalanced. He discussed, by comparison, how the flourishing of art through audience participation is encouraged by the Creative Commons license. Without such a generic license, he says, lawyers inhibit creative collaboration through insisting that someone own the specific work prior to it being created. However, this is only another agreement – a better license – rather than no license. Without a generic license, specific licenses caused an obstacle. What the Creative Commons provides is better law rather than lawlessness. This, I think, is very good and may distinguishes Lessig from Doctorow.
• He indicated that under copyright the rules for content in text differed from that in film and music and image. The “next generation of blogs,” however, will mix to create more powerful social commentary. Why? The power to “review” already exists. Is it the right to reference or to illustrate that is being demanded? The first, referencing, is likely available – I have never really worried out citing an expression as a fact – but the second is very problematic. Should I have the right to illustrate my creativity with yours without your agreement? Sadly, Lessing stated, incorrectly, that he thinks right to put music in NPR show as an illustrative background is a right. It is not unless there is payment. It is merely a license that it bought by NPR and paid for with the proceeds go back to the authors and other interest owners. He also said bloggers now cannot do what NPR can. That is true but merely because the copyright organizations like Canada’s SOCAN does not have a rate for internet use of music. Is that an illegality? It is neither prohibited or permitted, just as whistling another’s tune is not. Silence in law is not prohibition. Through various court rulings in Canada, we have something of a gap for now that is recognized in law, at least in Canada, which may make us something of a sanctuary at the present time. We may presently be the lucky nation for those purposes. But should the rights of bloggers and their desire to illustrate their creativity with the creativity of others come before the rights of those others to their creativity?
• He came out with the knee-jerk useless statement “The future is illegal.” Apart from the inability to know what that could mean even in the context of a downloading teen with a computer, I just do not think that this is true. The future is merely not defined.
• He suggests freedom is prevented when the control of culture is restricted to a few but why should the goal of unfettered progress take precedence over the interests of owners of each step in the inventive, progressive process? The digital medium of information really adds nothing to the consideration of that core question any more than previous electronic media or mass media have in the past. Are we not simply being intoxicated by the demands of speed – which demand is merely a product of the possibility of speed? Should the capacities of technology govern our human relations?
• One caller spoke of the need to be specifically paid – she has worked for 20 years to create and audience she needs to sell her CDs. “So we all have our frustrations,” Lessing responds, less than effectively, but a wider range of choices to be made available to artists. The license is merely a technique to make money. Don’t use it if you do not want to. He reiterated he does not support piracy. He cites, however, a recent restrictive sampling case from a US court and its result that entirely barred unpermitted use of another’s work was left as an unargued point – an implicit wrong. He followed by an implicit good, Mixter, a wep space that allowed consensual collaboration. But this is a false dichotomy, an unpermitted unlicensed taking compared to a permitted licensed use and necessarily contrary to what he indicated to the musician of 20 year’s effort. If her work can be sampled without consent, then there is piracy. Plain and simple. He also made what appeared to be an error in analogy, comparing sharing his ideas when speaking with sharing an artists expression – this is a strict division in copyright law. You have no right to the idea just the particular expression of the idea. Software programming interestingly fuses the two as their are both the idea and the expression (due to, in a way, being both the instruction and the execution). Perhaps this is the problem. The analogy from software and cretivity to other media and creativity may simply not hold – yet it pervades this discussion.
• For Lessig, the de-commoditization of software outside of proprietary interest as an extraordinary collaboration is a “dramatic model” which one presumes intelf makes it compellingly applicable elsewhere. He speaks too much of the need for generic “experimentation”. But can it really be transferred to creative activity in which the artist must have their specific work recognized as a unique commodity to be paid over a lifetime? Are we perhaps enamoured by the new technology to the point we are forgetting that the proposed general progress will create unacceptable consequences. How different is this really from earlier industrial revolution stages which sees the craftsman and artist crushed by the new, in this case, freeing them from the burden of stable income? In cooking they say do not pick up a hot pot without some idea of where you are going to put it down. There is as yet none of that good sense in this question.

Please comment, question and kick at will.

PS – not only did I originally spell it Lessing, I do have this desire to call him Doris.