Culture and code
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The fundamental change is the fact that code had been used to create things like printer-drivers and such. But – since a few years, code, or rather the tools that had been coded have become a main element in the creation of culture as we use and witness it today. Especially the whole mashup-culture is heavily relying on the techniques and the mindset of digital creation and open access to other's works for sampling from and building upon, etc. Popular examples are the anime music-clip subculture like the Muppet Hunter, the Jesus Christ the Musical-clip or lots of pieces that borrow from news networks' footage to make their own suggestive edits.
Firstly, what won't work – Hackers and technologists trying to break the system: They will continue to be able to break manifestations of the system like DRM but that is not really solving the overall problem. (John Perry Barlow later strongly disagreed and argued that "a combination of massive civil disobedience and the fact that we [the electronic Hezbollah] are more skilled" will solve all those issues). Count on the system to change itself: Won't work either, especially in the US-context where virtually all parts of the political spectrum are strongly opposed against changing intellectual property rights towards greater openness. A guy he called Hollywood Howard just got to be the head of the most powerful organization in that area, proving that the property lobby has established a very firm grip there. Litigation: Lessig is a lawyer, and he first tried to go the legal way, took the case about Sunny Bono to the supreme court – and lost. In his view, the courts don't understand the issue. Secondly, what will work – creating an infrastructure. In the late 1930s there was an interesting process in the US where an organization called ASCAP was owning all the rights to the most popular music and thus virtually holding the emerging broadcasting industry practically hostage. A second organization, called BMI, appeared, and even though they had an inferior portfolio of artists and titles, quickly shattered the power of ASCAP because they offered a far more attractive infrastructure for both artists and broadcasters. In Lessig's view, Creative Commons' ideal role would be to empower the change to come through the same creation of a framework.
This is, why CC is designed to be a modification to copyright which allows creators to assign licenses to their work in a more flexible way instead of imposing an quasi-ideological demand to share all their work for free on them, often met by great criticism. Lessig does admit however, that creative domains other than the creation of code will need to fight the same struggles as the free software-community has done in the last three decades in order to win this war. (Yes, he really said war) Closing the session, amidst an even more heated discussion, he pointed out that the current situation reminds him a lot of the movie Awakenings where a group of people who had been in a condition called catatonic state wake up and stay awake for a limited time before they fall back into this state. To Lessig, we're now in this phase of wake and we have a certain timeframe before the people who oppose access to culture will have cemented their views through DRM and legal deadlocks. Barlow had still a mic and replied "Oh, you're such a pessimist". You can find some more pictures on the 23C3-pool on Flickr and an actual gnu was also spotted at the venue. UPDATE: Here's the complete talk on Google Video. (Via Joi Ito) |
A short recap of 
So you could regard this as the pinnacle of today's tools of creativity, even the most important contemporary form of expression, probably even replacing speech and text in an American mass-media context as the main means to reach people. Having said this (and that's a bit of a rhetorical trick), he argued that threatening the freedom of this kind of usage of media equals threatening the freedom of speech itself. But, and that's a fact, the nagging question is whether this form of expression is legal or not, both in the US and elsewhere. Lessig told of a recent meeting in NYC where lawyers tried to explain the four conditions which you have to fulfil to be able to work under the law of Fair use. It took four lawyers, one hour and in the end the audience was only more confused. To him he said, it seemed a bit like the the Soviet Union somewhere in between the height of its power and its downfall and brought up the question just how you could have convinced the Soviet officials to change their system in that era. 
In his view, the system as it exists today doesn't work anymore (and it's constantly being ignored by many people because of that) and needs to be changed, so how would that work? 
However, despite the amazing success of CC with 150 million licenses already issued, there are people who disagree, also within the free code/culture/knowledge-movement. There (and this was also a nifty rhetorical trick), he revealed that actually, he's one of the old Soviets himself, because he actually doesn't want copyright as such to be abolished. While the we-don't-care-about-copies or join-if-you-want-to-use attitudes of the
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I have two concerns in this discussion:
1. Software and hardware are seen as tools for creating media: image, text, music, movie etc. However, we started to use the code as the medium of the artwork itself. What we create are not objects or objectified information anymore, we simply create systems. I feel like DRM and copyrights belong to a certain old view about the world of object production.
2. Cultural production is seen only as the work done in the studio or the work done with tools for media production. However, we also do work out of the designated working time and space, that is the work done by just living. You –Time's person of the year– actively generate metadata. These are informational and cultural content of the commodity that contribute to our zeitgeist, aesthetic views, political ideas, and economic wealth. This type of production can be criticized as art or not, but what is more important is these service providers (Google, Yahoo, Amazon etc.) accumulate data from us, and under US laws, such corporations already own our cultural products.
* I wrote these as a reaction to Lessig's talk at the Wizard of OS conference in Berlin.
nice post, thanks! I have a few posts on internet culture and creative commons, too
Good followup! I think however that a couple of key points were left out.
Lessig talked about the relative "freeness" of culture, covering various open-source licenses as the context for a comparitive discussion. He thinks we need to move beyond the the current
copyright diametric of either 95 Years restrictive remix-unfriendly copyright or giving away work wholesale. To remedy this he has produced a licensing infrastructure which priviledges the current needs of creation and distribution, particularly where digital production is concerned.
To make his point clear he drew a comparison of open computer source-code licenses: those of the BSD, MIT, Apache licenses and the vastly successful GNU GPL. He talked about the relative need for a license that has similar objectives to the GPL, but covered music/text/images; a license that comes with a social contract: modify, distribute, resell as long as the copyright license itself is
distributed with the work and that the work is, in turn, shared on under the same terms. This, he said, is vital if cultural production is to discourage "freeloading"; if the work was to be
released under a 'truly free' license equivocal to the BSD or moreso, the Apache 2.0 license (no restrictions on use or distribution at all other than the license remains intact), others (he used Sony in analogy) could take the work and release it without further making it available and even distributing the work under a new license altogether. This, he said, would give artists little motivation to create - in the sense of contributing to culture - and so
traditionally restrictive licensing models like those that dominate cultural production presently, would continue to throttle cultural production.
He pointed out that 80% of all opensource software is released under a GPL license (including Linux - the fastest growing operating system) and that this is proof that a 'share-alike' approach to licensing works; both in that it protects creator copyright while encouraging contribution to culture more broadly.
Finally it wasn't the GNU movement so much as the Free Software Foundation (responsible for the GNU/ GPL itself) that he attributes to the origins of this thinking. GNU is a project to build a portable operating system to run on top of kernels like that of Linux (resulting in the unpopular name GNU/Linux to describe the marriage of both kernel and OS).
My EUR 0.2c
I found Lessig's talk (and Doctorow's endorsement of it on Boing Boing) of particular interest since I see them both moving toward a centrist position which is where I've been since before Napster. While I like to imagine a future where *everything* is free and people play nice, I'm old enough to be sufficiently skeptical that I will not live to see that day (and I'm not that old).
The problem I've long had is that as tangible and intangible converge, the issues go beyond "songs, photographs, text" and enter the realm of "real" product. The future of piracy isn't movies, it's a designer-label object whose 3D manufacturing data is either forcibly liberated from the creators or reverse-engineered using 3D scanning technology. Assuming even that future everyday products contain elements that effectively self-destruct upon disassembly (sealed with no parting lines), the use of the same devices being developed now for the medical community allow that data to be gleened from an intact object. At that point, when one adds rapid manufacturing into the mix, you have the basis of a rather stifling environment for development of real, tangible products; not unlike what's currently going on in the professional photographic community. The value of creativity will decline markedly by that point, imo, and we'll see stagnation similar to that of the Soviet Union.
When this happens - and I believe it will at some point - the corporations that don't currently get any attention will be in control because they'll control the building blocks for future production. The focus is currently on media companies and their representatives (RIAA, MPAA, aso), but who's asking about low-level commodity items... like, for example, sugar? No one. Sugar is boring. Does anyone pay attention to plastic pellets using in industry? or metals? If they do I see little evidence of it. Yet those are the building blocks on which we all depend, and the companies that control those things will have an even greater hold over all of us so long as we feed on each other at higher levels - which is what downloading content against a creator's wishes does (note: Lessig has said that we should all respect the wishes of the creator regarding distribution; so if they license distribution of their content to a major music label, we should respect that... and I do, by either paying for or ignoring their product). In my opinion, we're currently shafting ourselves more than we're hurting the corporations.
There *does* need to be a moral context as indicated by the first questioner; but as Lessig rightly points out: who will determine that moraility? Will it be the greedy corporations or will it be the equally greedy population? Will it be the techies and their utopian ideas of what *should* be? What makes them think they can forecast the future any better than the Bush Administration and its primary reason for invading Iraq (stated by Wolfowitz and not related to WMD's) of bringing democracy to the Middle East? Forgive me for not drinking that non-branded but equally suspicious colored water.
We should all be very careful how we move foreward. The actions of the hacker community impact the media industry and that's no small thing, but it pales in comparison to destroying the jobs of factory laborers dependent on their employer to control the future of the product they produce. Our collective actions will come back to haunt us, imo, if we don't take the opportunity to get this right.
We should all be very careful how we move foreward. The actions of the hacker community impact the media industry and that's no small thing, but it pales in comparison to destroying the jobs of factory laborers dependent on their employer to control the future of the product they produce. Our collective actions will come back to haunt us, imo, if we don't take the opportunity to get this right.click on this link which is very interesting article
Music Industry Lawyer