Legal Research

Lawrence Lessig is a Pirates Fan

Lawrence Lessig posted a thoughful essay, In Defense of Piracy, in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) on Saturday.  What he calls piracy, I’d call “mashups” or “remixes”, but then you’re left with “In Defense of Remixes”, which is pretty flat indeed.

Anyway, Lesig starts with a story.  A young mother captures about 30 seconds of video of her toddler dancing to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy”.  She uploads it to YouTube so that friends and family can watch.  Four months later, YouTube gets a cease and desist letter from Universal Music Group.  The video has to come down.

“How is it that sensible people, people no doubt educated at some of the best universities and law schools in the country, would come to think it a sane use of corporate resources to threaten the mother of a dancing 13-month-old?  What is it that allows these lawyers and executives to take a case like this seriously, to believe there’s some important social or corporate reason to deploy the federal scheme of regulation called copyright to stop the spread of these images and music?  ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ indeed!”

But that’s where we’re at with copyright law in this country.  And it’s not just the little people who are bullied.  Lessig cites three instances in which the McCain and Obama campaigns were forced to stop using remixed material from Fox News, Warner Music, and NBC.

“The extreme of regulation that copyright law has become makes it difficult, sometimes impossible, for a wide range of creativity that any free society — if it thought about it for just a second — would allow to exist, legally.”

Our economy as a whole could benefit from piracy — or remixes or mashups, whatever — if they are “properly balanced” between creativity for the amateurs and compensation for the artists.  Lessig proposes “five changes that would make a world of difference:”

• Copyright law should not attempt to regulate amateur remixes.

• “The law should also give up its obsession with ‘the copy,’ and focus instead on uses — like public distributions of copyrighted work — that connect directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster.”  (I quoted this in its entirety because I’m not a lawyer and it would take me like 6 hours to figure out how to summarize this point.)

• Since copyright law basically regulates everyone with a computer, simplify it.

• Copyright owners should bear the burden of maintaining their copyright so that it is obvious who owns what.

• Work on making sure that artists get paid fairly rather than trying to stop file sharing.  (I’m a little fuzzy on how this is going to work out, but no matter.)

Lessig’s new book, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy — due out tomorrow — covers this topic in 350 pages of glorious detail.

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on October 15, 2008 (boomark / email).