Reexamining the remix Lawrence Lessig
I want to talk about what we learn from
conservatives and I’m at a stage in life
where I’m yearning for my old days so I
want to confess to you that when I was a
kid
indeed I was conservative I was a young
Republican a teenage Republic and a
leader in the teenage Republicans indeed
I was the youngest member of any
delegation in the 1980 convention that
elected Ronald Reagan to be the
Republican nominee for president now I
know what you’re thinking you’re
thinking that’s not what the Internet’s
say you’re thinking Wikipedia doesn’t
say this fact and indeed this is just
one of the examples of the junk that
flows across the tubes in these
Internet’s here
Wikipedia reports that this guy this
former congressman from Erie
Pennsylvania was at the age of twenty
one of the youngest people at the
Republican National Convention but it’s
just not true
indeed it drives me so nuts let me just
change this
all right okay speaker lawrence lessig
right okay finally truth will be brought
here okay see right it’s done it’s
almost done okay we’re finished that’s
it please save this great and Wikipedia
is fixed finally okay but no this is
really it besides the point but the
thing I want you to think about when we
think about conservatives not so much
this issue of the 1980 convention the
thing to think about is this they go to
church oh you know I mean a lot of
people go to church I’m not talking
about that only conservatives go to
church and I’m not talking about the god
thing I don’t want to get into that you
know that’s not my point they go to
church by which I mean they do lots of
things for free for each other they hold
potluck dinners indeed they sell books
about potluck dinners they serve food to
poor people they share they give they
give away for free and it’s the very
same people leading Wall Street firms
who on Sunday show up and share and not
only food right these very same people
are strong believers in lots of context
in the limits on the markets they are in
many important places against markets
indeed they like all of us celebrate
this kind of relationship and they’re
very keen that we don’t let money drop
into that relationship else it turns
into something like this they want to
regulate us those conservatives to stop
us from allowing the market to spread in
those places because they understand
there are places for the market and
places where the market should not exist
where we should be free to enjoy the
fellowship
of others they recognize both of these
things have to live together and second
great thing about conservatives they get
a ecology right it was the first great
Republican president of the 20th century
who taught us about environmental
thinking Teddy Roosevelt they first
taught us about ecologies in the context
of natural resources and then they began
to teach us in the context of innovation
economics they understand in that
context free they understand free is an
important essential part of the cultural
ecology as well that’s the thing I want
you to think about that now I know you
don’t believe me really here so here’s
exhibit number one I want to share with
you my latest hero Julian Sanchez a
libertarian who works at the for many
people evil Cato Institute okay so
Julian made this video he’s a terrible
producer of videos but it’s great
content I’m gonna give you a little bit
of it so here he is beginning the way
remix culture seems to be evolving so
what he does is he begins to tell us
about these three
this is fantastic Brad pack remix said
to this which of course spread virally
hugely successful and then two people
from Brooklyn saw it they decided they
wanted to do the same
and then of course people from San
Francisco saw it in San Francisco’s
thought they had to be the same as well
so they’re beautiful but this
libertarian has some important lessons
he wants us to learn from this here’s
lesson number one there’s obviously also
something really deeply great about this
they’re acting in the sense that they’re
emulating the original mash up as a dime
you shot it obviously has a strong eye
and some experience with video editing
but this is also basically just a group
of friends having an authentic social
moment and screwing around together
it should feel familiar and kind of
resonating for anyone who’s had a
sing-along or dance party with a group
of good friends or so that’s importantly
different from the earlier videos we
looked at because here remix isn’t just
about an individual doing something
alone in this basement
it becomes an act of social creativity
and it’s not just that it yields a
different kind of product at the end is
that potentially it changes the way we
relate to each other all of our normal
social interactions become a kind of
invitation to this sort of collective
expression it’s our real social lives
themselves that are transmuted into art
and so that misty criterion draws from
these two points one remix is about
individuals using our shared culture as
a kind of language to communicate
something to an audience stage two
social remix is really about using it to
mediate people’s relationships with each
other
first within each video the brat pack
characters are used as a kind of
template for performing the social
reality of each group but there’s also a
dialogue between the videos where once
the basic structure is established it
becomes a kind of platform for
articulating the similarities and
differences between the groups social
and physical worlds and then it is for
me the critical key to what Julien has
to say copyright policy isn’t just about
how to incentivize the production of a
certain kind of artistic commodity it’s
about what level of control we’re gonna
permit
the exercise over our social realities
social realities that are now inevitably
permeated by pop culture I think it’s
important that we keep these two
different kinds of public goods in mind
if we’re only focused on how to maximize
the supply of one I think we risk
suppressing this different and richer
and in some ways maybe even more
importantly right sphingo point freedom
needs this opportunity to both have the
commercial success of the great
commercial works and the opportunity to
build this different kind of culture and
for that to happen you need ideas 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 the point is they he
here gets that culture now my concern is
we Dems too often not so much right
think for example about this great
company in the good old days when this
Republican ran that company their
greatest work was work that built on the
past right all of the great Disney works
were works that took works that were in
the public domain and remixed them or
waited till they entered to the public
domain to remix them to celebrate this
add-on remix creativity indeed Mickey
Mouse himself of course as Steamboat
Willie is a remix of the then very
dominant very popular steamboat bill by
Buster Keaton this man was a remixer
extraordinary he is the celebration and
ideal of exactly this kind of creativity
but then the company passes in through
this dark stage to this Democrat wildly
different this is the mastermind behind
the eventual passage of what we call the
Sonny Bono copyright term extension Act
extending the term of existing
copyrights by 20 years so that no one
could do to Disney what Disney
did to the Brothers Grimm now when we
tried to challenge this going to the
Supreme Court getting the Supreme Court
the bunch of conservatives there if we
could get them to wake up to this to
strike it down
we had the assistance of Nobel Prize
winners including this right-wing Nobel
Prize winner Milton Friedman who said he
would join our brief only if the word
no-brainer was in the brief somewhere
but apparently no brains existed in this
place when Democrats passed and signed
this bill into law now tiny little
quibble of a footnote Sonny Bono you
might say was a Republican but I don’t
buy it this guy is okay our second
example think about this cultural hero
icon on the Left creator of this
character look at the site that he built
Star Wars mashup inviting people to come
and use their creative energy to produce
a new generation of attention towards
this extraordinarily important cultural
icon read the license the license for
these really mixers assigns all of the
rights to the remix back to Lucas the
mash-up is owned by Lucas indeed
anything you add to the mashup music you
might add Lucas has a worldwide
perpetual right to exploit that for free
there is no creator here to be
recognized the Creator doesn’t have any
rights the Creator is a sharecropper in
this story and we should remember who
employed the sharecroppers the Democrats
right so the point is the Republicans
here recognize that there’s a certain
need of ownership or respect for
ownership the respect we should give to
the Creator the remixer the owner the
property owner the copyright owner of
this extraordinarily powerful stuff and
not a generation of sharecroppers now I
think there are lessons we should learn
here lessons about openness our lives
our sharing activities at least in part
even for the head of Goldman Sachs
at least in part and for that sharing
activity to happen we have to have well
protected spaces of fair use that’s
number one number two the psychology of
sharing needs freedom within which to
creates freedom which means without
permission from anyone the ability to
create and number three we need to
respect the Creator the creator of these
remixes through rights that are directly
tied to them now this explains the
right-wing nonprofit Creative Commons
actually it’s not a right-wing profit
but of course let me just tie it here
are the Creative Commons which is
offering auteurs this simple way to mark
their content with the freedoms they
intended to carry so that we go from a
all rights reserved world to a some
rights reserved world so that people can
know the freedoms they have attached to
the content building and creating on the
basis of this creative copyrighted work
these tools that we’ve built enable this
sharing in parts through licenses that
make it clear and a freedom to create
without requiring permission first
because the permission has already been
granted and a respect for the creator
because it builds upon a copyright the
Creator HAP’s
licensed freely and it explains the vast
right-wing conspiracy that’s obviously
developed around these licenses as now
more than three hundred and fifty
million digital objects are out there
licensed freely in this way now that
picture of an ecology of creativity the
picture of an ecology of balanced
creativity is that the ecology of
creativity we have right now well as you
all know not many of us believe we do I
tripped on the reality of this ecology
of creativity just last week I created a
video which was based on a wire side
chat that I had given and I uploaded it
to YouTube I then got this email from
YouTube
weirdly notifying me that there was
content in that owned by the mysterious
W
mg that matched their Content ID so I
didn’t think much about it and then on
Twitter somebody said to me your talk on
YouTube was DMC age was that your
purpose imagining that I had this deep
conspiracy to reveal the obvious flaws
in the DMCA answer no I didn’t even
think about it but then I went to the
site and all of the audio in my site had
been silenced my whole 45 minute video
had been silenced because they were
snippets in that video a video about
fair use that included Warner Music
Group music now interestingly they still
sold ads for that music if you played
the silent video you can still buy the
music but you couldn’t hear anything
because it had been silenced so I did
what the current regime says I must do
to be free to use YouTube to talk about
fair use I went to this site and I had
to answer these questions and then in an
extraordinarily Bart Simpson like
juvenile way you’ve actually got to type
out these words and get them rights to
reassert your freedom to speak and I
felt like I was in third grade again I
will not put tacks on the teachers chair
I will not give tax on
teachers cheer this is absurd it is
outrageous it is extraordinary
perversion of the system of freedom we
should be encouraging and the question I
ask you is who’s fighting it well
interestingly in the last presidential
election who was the number one active
opponents of this system of regulation
in online speech John McCain letter
after letter attacking YouTube’s refusal
to be more respectful of fair use but
they’re extraordinary notice and
takedown system that led his campaign so
many times to be thrown off the internet
now that was a story of me then my good
old days of right-wing lunacy let me
come back to now now when I’m a live a
leftist I’m certainly left-handed so at
least a lefty and I wonder can we on the
Left expect to build this ecology of
freedom now in a world where we know the
extraordinary powerful
influences against it where even icons
of the left like this entertain and push
bills that would effectively ban the
requirement of open access for
government-funded research the president
who has supported a process that
secretly negotiates agreements which
effectively lock us into the insane
system of dense DMCA that we have
adopted and likely lock us down a path
of three strikes you’re out then of
course the rest of the world are
increasingly adopting not a single
example of reform has been produced yet
and we’re not going to see this change
in this system anytime soon so here’s
the lessons of openness that I think we
need to learn openness is a commitment
to a certain set of values we need to
speak of those values the value of
freedom it’s a value of community it’s a
value of the limits in regulation it’s a
value respecting the Creator now if we
can learn those values from
some influences on the right if we can
take them and incorporate them maybe we
could do a little trade we learn those
values on the left and maybe they’ll do
health care or global warming
legislation or something on the right
anyway please join me in teaching these
values thank you very much