Lawrence Lessig (Summit 2006)
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Free Culture is breathing for the mind. We copy, remix, and write. We remix when we watch a movie and whine about it to our friends. We achieve our literacy through practice.
Free Culture is free: unregulated, needing no permission, a basic human right, and not infantilizing the human culture. Words are free and can't be stopped.
Some reedited media are: Danger Mouse's "Grey Album", "Hey Ya" and Charles Schulz, and Fox: The Matrix has you.
Writing today uses different tools. The digital remix is becoming democratized. It is changing freedom and the power to speak from the bottom up, with blogs and P2P downloads.
Is it allowed? When tools change, do freedoms change as well? We have new uses, but old laws. It is now analog versus digital. The analog's default is free, and most uses didn't produce a copy. The digital default is regulated, with every use producing a copy and every use requiring permission.
DRM technology supports a permission culture. Control had been lost when the item had been bought, such as the case with Disney and the VCR; they couldn't actually control what you did with the tape you bought. But in the cyber world, control can be achieved at a distance. This is creating a couch potato culture: how we consume, and how we create, is being controlled.
Free Culture is idealism. Demand answers. Ask "What the fuck?" Ask why. Demand justifications. Answers won't come from people with mortgages, answers will come from students.
How can we have a strategy for forcing answers.
1) Being right and seeming right: Grokster was the right to support technology innovators as free from the regulation of the courts. Piracy does not excuse the total control of technology. But 90% of the world doesn't get it. They saw it as a "right to steal". Lesson being, pick battles better.
2) Help fight battles.
2.1: The Apple iPod ties iTunes to iPods, and restricts competition. We should support laws, norms, business models, and internet architectures that make DRM unnecessary. Protest record stores, and protest online DRM.
2.2: Demand open access to knowledge. We pay professors with the blocking and restricting of knowledge to rich universities in rich countries.
2.3: Free content licensing, and interoperability of the licenses. Wikipedia, Flickr, and MIT open courseware all use free content licenses, but they don't use the same ones. We need to raise awareness and demand cooperation. The objective is to remove the lawyers from the process of creativity, not by ignoring the law but by making lawyers unnecessary.
3) Consider
3.1: Building a world where we can live virtually as a second life
3.2: Come to Brazil. The iCommons iSummit 2005, where we share the past and create the future. It's a platform to facilitate planning.
Only students can breathe. Demonstrate conscience, demand reasons, and embarass those in power. Stay principled - others will be pragmatic. Stay pure around the ideals of freedom.
There is a difference between public opinion in different countries, concerning the ideology around property, diversity, communism.
Students need to reach out to the general public - the topic is rather obscure, we need to open up and engage and make it approachable. Demonstrate - people don't get to hear our side of the arguments. NYU should make and show cool movies, with copyright experts describing all violations of the law, and show the audience why the current copyright law is wrong.
Why is it wrong, what can we do? We should update the law to reflect the technology. We should no longer be felons for being creative.
How can we summarize the Free Culture ideal in a concise and direct way?
- cultural participation, active not passive
- slogans can come later. We should make short movies now, so that people can see it in 30 different contexts
- copyright and culture
- show off dumb outrages by the bullies to get people on our side
What are universities doing that we should agitate against or about?
- Libraries are the most affected. Explain why we should have open archives. Develop a best practices document for libraries and universities.
- Learn how to hassle faculty. Tell them to stop publishing closed-source information. They are slow to defend the rights of students.
Copyright is more illegal than alcohol and laws
The majority of people receive the utility they need, and that's enough for them.
There is a difference between quoting and clipping. With quoting in writing, all you need to do is cite the source. With clipping in films, you need the permission of the source.
Questions
The importance of participation and remixing: does illegality hamper creativity? It stops education from teaching, but it doesn't stop people from mixing. Most content is original; should we teach mixing art? Would an alternative structural framework affect gender and racial lines? Would it be politically progressive? There are many subtleties and nuances, and respect for the author's rights.
It's not just thinking, but practice as well. For example, the NYU film festival: universities are unwilling to have film remix classes. We need to butt heads over the legality, and push school administrators. We communicate through media, film, and music - other than we readers and writes who ignore it, but we only make up 1%. We need to gain recognition. It is good to build a positive relationship with administrators sometimes.
Public domain is for science, Creative Commons is for science. We have extreme copyright, with all rights reserved, and extreme public domain, where we don't even give attribution. It is only norms that enforce attribution.
We need to be a democratizing force: how do we spread technology? The digital divide is a crucial factor. We need to be more diverse internationally, and find different ways for facilitating access.