Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy [Bargain Price] [Hardcover]

Lawrence Lessig (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 16, 2008

The author of Free Culture shows how we harm our children—and almost anyone who creates, enjoys, or sells any art form—with a restrictive copyright system driven by corporate interests. Lessig reveals the solutions to this impasse offered by a collaborative yet profitable “hybrid economy”.

Lawrence Lessig, the reigning authority on intellectual property in the Internet age, spotlights the newest and possibly the most harmful culture war—a war waged against our kids and others who create and consume art. America’s copyright laws have ceased to perform their original, beneficial role: protecting artists’ creations while allowing them to build on previous creative works. In fact, our system now criminalizes those very actions.

For many, new technologies have made it irresistible to flout these unreasonable and ultimately untenable laws. Some of today’s most talented artists are felons, and so are our kids, who see no reason why they shouldn’t do what their computers and the Web let them do, from burning a copyrighted CD for a friend to “biting” riffs from films, videos, songs, etc and making new art from them.

Criminalizing our children and others is exactly what our society should not do, and Lessig shows how we can and must end this conflict—a war as ill conceived and unwinnable as the war on drugs. By embracing “read-write culture,” which allows its users to create art as readily as they consume it, we can ensure that creators get the support—artistic, commercial, and ethical—that they deserve and need. Indeed, we can already see glimmers of a new hybrid economy that combines the profit motives of traditional business with the “sharing economy” evident in such Web sites as Wikipedia and YouTube. The hybrid economy will become ever more prominent in every creative realm—from news to music—and Lessig shows how we can and should use it to benefit those who make and consume culture.

Remix is an urgent, eloquent plea to end a war that harms our children and other intrepid creative users of new technologies. It also offers an inspiring vision of the post-war world where enormous opportunities await those who view art as a resource to be shared openly rather than a commodity to be hoarded.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Should anyone besides libertarian hackers or record companies care about copyright in the online world? In this incisive treatise, Stanford law prof and Wired columnist Lessig (Free Culture) argues that we should. He frames the problem as a war between an old read-only culture, in which media megaliths sell copyrighted music and movies to passive consumers, and a dawning digital read-write culture, in which audiovisual products are freely downloaded and manipulated in an explosion of democratized creativity. Both cultures can thrive in a hybrid economy, he contends, pioneered by Web entities like YouTube. Lessig's critique of draconian copyright laws—highlighted by horror stories of entertainment conglomerates threatening tweens for putting up Harry Potter fan sites—is trenchant. (Why, he asks, should sampling music and movies be illegal when quoting texts is fine?) Lessig worries that too stringent copyright laws could stifle such remix masterpieces as a powerful doctored video showing George Bush and Tony Blair lip-synching the song Endless Love, or making scofflaws of America's youth by criminalizing their irrepressible downloading. We leave this (copyrighted) book feeling the stakes are pretty low, except for media corporations. (Oct. 20)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

As Lessig, a law professor at Stanford, sees it, if intellectual-property law is left as it is an entire generation will be criminalized. He argues that the ways in which young people break copyright laws help them to become the sort of people we want them to be�creative and collaborative. Kids today are simply not going to give up downloading music and using copyrighted material in YouTube videos: they belong to a culture for which �remix� is �the essential art.� Lessig�s proposals for revising copyright are compelling, because they rethink intellectual-property rights without abandoning them. He argues that hybrids that combine the �commercial and sharing� economies can create value for both sides (as Harry Potter fan sites and Lostpedia have done); indeed, one problem is media companies� appropriating the work of fans without returning the favor. �When both benefit,� Lessig writes, �how do we say who is riding for free?�
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The (October 16, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594201722
• ASIN: B0029LHWFY
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #756,971 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Prior to rejoining the Harvard faculty, Lessig was a professor at Stanford Law School, where he founded the school's Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court.

Lessig serves on the Board of Creative Commons, MapLight, Brave New Film Foundation, The American Academy, Berlin, AXA Research Fund and iCommons.org, and on the advisory board of the Sunlight Foundation. He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Association, and has received numerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation's Freedom Award, Fastcase 50 Award and being named one of Scientific American's Top 50 Visionaries.

Lessig holds a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a JD from Yale.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Handbook for a Creative Future! December 3, 2008

By Tama Leaver

Format:Hardcover

Remix is the culmination of Lawrence Lessig's tireless arguments about the importance of creativity being able to be built on the foundations of culture that already exists, a pathway only open if the extremes of copyright are sobered and a shared, free commons is actively promoted and created. Some of the arguments will be familiar from Lessig's previous book Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity but Remix takes them to a new depth. More to the point, Remix, despite being written by a lawyer, is an extremely accessible work that makes its arguments with humour and is easy to read. The argument is compelling, and Remix has a place in the libraries of schools and universities and the bookshelves of anyone interested in a creativity culture built on the successes of the past with the tools of the future.

(My only criticism would be this book is very US-centric, but that's Lessig's prerogative; others needs to extend these arguments beyond national boundaries.)

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Think of the children December 3, 2008

By Nathan Otto

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

The core of this book is a question about what kind of world we want to create for future generations. Lessig presents an argument that the natural way humans interact with content is to remix it, as we are used to doing with text. Just as we take no offense when somebody quotes our text in their own communication, we should resist the urge to control "quoting" of our digital content.

This is a passionately written book, but it takes some engagement with the issue to really enjoy it. Starting with another of Lessig's books, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, might help a reader get into the subject, but once he or she realizes the consequences of culture's legal stance on this issue, Lessig's perspective becomes invaluable to have around. That book more sets out the conditions created by sharing economies, where Remix looks for how art and business can survive under these conditions.

Lessig's lessons on how businesses can thrive or fail as hybrids may help content-producers get a grip as the financial industry melts down.

The main point, as I said, is about the world and culture we create for our children. Do we want a world where they have free "speech" in hundreds of digital "languages", or one where their natural abilities are locked down? Lessig offers advice on how to change law and ourselves to create a culture where our children's expression is cherished (for the sake of their education and their community-building). He wants to start a conversation about how business can thrive among sharing economies as well. This book will be a key perspective in that conversation.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An important and urgent work of radical moderation January 14, 2009

By Jonathan Zittrain

Format:Hardcover

By its own account, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has threatened thousands of people -- many of them teenagers -- with lawsuits for sharing copies of copyrighted music without permission. Most individuals pay several thousand dollars to settle out of court. In the only such case to go to trial in the United States, the jury awarded the RIAA $222,000 in a verdict against a woman from Duluth, Minnesota, who shared 24 songs that had a retail value of $23.76. Massachusetts youth Joel Tenenbaum has also refused to settle, and his trial will soon begin -- more than $1 million is at stake for allegations that he shared seven songs.

In Remix, Lawrence Lessig says 'enough' to this situation, arguing for a hybrid approach that differentiates private and commercial use. His book is an important and urgent work of radical moderation. It seeks to get both sides to stand down and respect one another, using arguments couched in terms of each party's values. Lessig wants to persuade traditional publishers -- the purveyors of 'read-only' culture -- that they should not fear their own fans. Publishers stand to make more money by embracing those who make new works from old standards than they do by criminalizing them. More subtly, Lessig argues that a strict divide between the world of sharing and the world of commerce is counterproductive. He wants to refocus attention away from the stalemated copyright wars and towards a more vibrant 'read-write culture' that remixes rather than replaces what came before. The future lies with hybrid enterprises that wisely blend the mercenary 'me' and the charitable 'thee'.

Lessig points out that the act of writing is near-universal. We teach our children how to write at an early age, and the tools to do so have long been accessible. With so much writing going on, there is bound to be appropriation of others' work, but its universal character has meant that no one minds, as long as it is attributed. The accessibility of new tools of digital literacy -- and with them the ability to remix audiovisual works -- is a much more recent phenomenon. Here, Lessig says, our instincts are too often wrongly grounded in the elaborate rules of copyright and licensing practices that date from an era when only big publishers could effectively edit such works. Lessig claims that the new is actually the old: before the rise of mass media, people naturally reworked audiovisual works as they sang the songs or performed the plays of the day. Even the most orthodox copyright proponents did not object. Some, such as composer John P. Sousa, thought this remixing crucial, lest the new "infernal machines" of mass media led to a world only of "the mechanical device and the professional executants". The loss of amateur 'yeoman creators', says Lessig, cheapens and flattens our culture, and worse, alienates us from our kids.

Lessig's ingenious framing makes the late-twentieth-century dominance of read-only culture the outlier, a rut caused by historical accident. It was a particular combination of technological development and some unintended language -- the word 'copies' -- by the drafters of the US Copyright Act of 1909 that vastly expanded the scope of regulation. Free markets and democracy are the respective private- and public-sector innovations that ensure the past does not unduly dominate the future. Lessig fears that if read-write culture is marginalized by the law, this will detrimentally reinforce the status quo; the tenet of 'what is now, ought to be' is one of Lessig's main enemies, as in nearly all of his works. He is desperate for us to reflect on what counts as normal, and what counts as depraved, in a zone too often defined and dominated by soulless lawyers.

The sharing economy that has thrived alongside the Internet greatly intrigues Lessig. Although he concedes that no one has yet fully understood its magic, he is concerned that too much purism can kill it. Here, one can find a quiet remonstrance that content and code are different creatures, and thus some of the types of licence that sharing-oriented people might choose for free software might not be suited to content that is shared. Lessig is the founder of Creative Commons, a non-profit organization that provides creators with flexible copyright licences. In Remix, he outlines the case for licences that make one's work free for non-commercial use but reserve any right to commercial exploitation to the author -- something that is traditionally anathema to the free-software movement.

Lessig approves of sharing activities that fall beneath a corporate umbrella, as long as they are in touch with their volunteer communities, and he sketches what can make them work. In one quietly controversial paragraph, he advocates that the current allocation of copyright infringement liability in these situations should be reversed. For example, YouTube ought to answer more for the copyright infringement of its users because it profits from such transgressions, whereas the infringing users should be protected because their activities amount to non-commercial sharing.

Successful hybrid enterprises abound. Yahoo! Answers is a web-based service to which people post questions and others answer them for payment in the form of non-monetary points. Interestingly, the similar service Google Answers sought to pay contributors outright, and it folded. One wonders what would have happened in the late 1990s if Microsoft's Encarta encyclopaedia had started paying for corrections and improvements from the world at large -- would users of the nascent Wikipedia have felt they were doing for free what otherwise ought to be charged? Other hybrid phenomena -- such as the classified-advertising network Craigslist, wiki-hosting service Wikia and even Google itself -- will soon find themselves competing not only with pure community enterprises such as Wikipedia, but also with a new set of mercenary but distributed services. These include InnoCentive, which awards bounties to those who can solve particular problems, usually in exchange for transferring all rights to the solutions to those paying for them; Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a marketplace for people to do mind-numbing work that still only a human can do; and LiveOps, a 'virtual call centre' that creates communities of independent contractors, each in their own homes, who might take pizza orders one moment and staff a hotline for hurricane survivors the next.

Ultimately, Lessig seeks to shed his copyright-fighter's reputation, acquired in part through his challenge -- for which I was a co-counsel -- to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in the United States. The case was lost in 2003 at the US Supreme Court by a majority of 7-2. Lessig's goal is not to overthrow the current system so much as to temper its shortsighted excesses and to give a little something to everyone. Remix is dedicated both to L. Ray Patterson, a copyright historian who would no doubt have agreed with Lessig's prescriptions for copyright reform, and to Jack Valenti, the late president of the Motion Picture Association of America. Lessig and Valenti debated several times, and agreed on nothing except the observation that our children's values are out of touch with read-only culture and the law that tilts so far in its favour. Lessig hopes to appeal to the Sousa within Valenti's successor and partners, yet as the founder of modern cyberlaw, he has a more ambitious agenda: dealing with what he sees as a more general corruption of the democratic political system originally intended to save us from our economic, legal and cultural ruts. Perhaps Lessig's smaller battle is being won: in late December it was reported that the RIAA was abandoning new lawsuits against individual file sharers. But Joel Tenenbaum's trial continues.