Larry Lessig begins by citing John Philip Sousa’s concern in 1906 that the phonograph would end kids hanging around, singing the old songs together. Larry says he was right. A read-write culture was displaced by a read-only culture. [Paraphrasing, of course.] [The audio of LEssig’s talk is here.]

This is not just about cullture, he says. The Republican party started out believing in free labor. Not unpaid, but free to engage its capabilities as it wants. The return of read-write labor is key to Benkler’s Wealth of Networks and also to Wikipedia.

Same for politics where broadcast politics displaced read-write politics.E.g., the Dean campaign that encouraged people to explain their thinking in blogs.

The 20th Century was weirdly totalitarian: R/O culture, politics and labor.Massiv, massively powerful, controlled, read-only society. But, fortunately, that century is over. The 21st Century is the revival of the read-write.

There are two very new cultures being produced by the Internet. The first is a new kind of read-only culture that facilitates the buying and consumption of culture. Poster child: Apple I-Tunes. Trying to increasingly perfect the power of the copyright holder.

The second is a second culture in which people consume and create. E.g., Anime music video that reedits anime and sets them to music. Larry shows one. It’s a remix. [I worry about the emphasis on remixes. The examples are almost always trivial, even if delightful. Remixes of these sorts aren’t the issue. It’s the subtler absorption of cultural elements that’s the issue.]

Words are the Latin of our time, he says. The vulgar, democratic language is pictures, videos and music. [Which is why Larry focuses on those sorts of remixes.]

The law’s attitude to these two cultures is radically different. Copyright law doesn’t like the R/W culture. It loves the R/O culture. The law’s attitude is that every use makes a copy and thus requires permission. This is made worse by the desire to preserve the business model of the R/O culture. The laws and technology will kill the R/W culture unless there’s resistance.

How to resist? Larry’s first instinct was to litigate. He (we) lost 7-2 when the Supremes said Congress can do whatever it wants with copyright. Instead, Larry decided, we need to ignite a popular movement. We need to take two steps:

First, practice free culture.

Second, enable free culture. Make it possible everywhere, not just in the hacker’s den. Wikipedia is an example. Wikipedia shows that it’s possible.

There are lessons about how this extraordinary potential is possible. There is a proprietary instinct, but we’ve learned that freedom is a bigger, more important value. The Defense Dept. ended the cycle of autistic computing — smart machines that couldn’t communicate — by insisting that computers interoperate. Open, free standards facilitates competition and opportunity. We should remember that lesson as we praftice free culture.

But it’s not enough to build the infrastructure. We have to make it possible. There’s a clear and present danger to this freedom. When they build the locks to protect the R/O Internet, they will lock out the R/W Internet.

At the technical layer: Support free codecs. Support free software that enables free culture.

At the legal layer: Protect free culture. Larry points to Creative Commons as an example. Now there are 140 million link backs to CC licenses.

Larry praises Wikipedia but says he also is here to plea that Wikipedia does what it can to increase free culture. He points to two ways: First, help others spread the practice. He points to the PD-Wiki project (public domain wiki). It will launch first in Canada where a database of all published works is becoming available. From this will come, it’s hoped, a better list of what is and is not in the public domain.

Second, Wikipedians should demand a useable platform for freedom. Free culture products aren’t usually interoperable. We need a layer that facilitates interoperability of content enabling it to move among equivalent licenses. Equivalent = means the same thing. E.g., FDL = CC-BY-SA. Re-licensing would create an ecology of licenses. A market of licenses. The legal layer would become a commodity layer. No monopoly. No single source of failure if a court deems a particular license unworkable. License authors ought to add a compability clause that says that derivatives can be relicsensed under equivalent licenses. The Software Freedom Law Center could be the organization that is the center of this. Even if this isn’t the right platform, Wikipedia could be a strong force for establishing some platform for cultural freedom, says Larry.

[Tags: wikimania2006 wikipedia larry_lessig copyright]

Categories: Uncategorized dw