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August 4, 2006
Larry Lessig: Fighting for Free Culture
Here are my notes from Larry Lessig's talk at wikimania2006. These notes aren't verbatim; please listen to the podcast for the whole megillah. -andy
Lessig hass spent the last nine months talking about read-only cultures vs. read-write cultures. In 1906, John Philip Sousa went to Congress to talk about "talking machines." These talking machines - record players and the like - were going to ruin artistic culture because they will discourage people getting together in person to make music.Read-write culture is where people participate in the creation and re-creation of culture. Sousa feared that recording devices would take away from the creative process - a world of consumers only.
Looking back at the 20th century, it's hard not to conclude that Sousa was right. The production of culture became concentrated and professionalized.
Historically there are lots of aspects of culture where we've stopped being read-write. The free labor movement is an example. Free as in free to engage your capacities as a laborer. Autonomy - the capacity to use the means of production to own and create content.
The 21st century is seeing this idea return. Read Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks. It's the lesson of the free software movement. They are empowered to produce - doing it because they want to and love it. Read-write labor, just like Wikipedia.
19th century federalists were elitist aristocrats. They didn't really like democracy. That elitism was killed by Jefferson's Republicans, that got people participating in civic dialogue. This was then killed by broadcast politics - the 30-second commercial. Now the 21st century is giving us a chance to revive Jefferson's ideas.
Political blogs - places where people are forced to explain their reasoning, transforming them from couch potatoes to activists. Read-write politics.
All of this shows how the 20th century was weird, totalitarian. Centralizing institutions controlling how culture, labor and politics developed. (Shows pics of Stalin and Bill Gates - big laugh). Read-only society - profoundly weird.
That century is now over - it's passed. The 21st is the revival of the old way to organize and participate - freer, read-write.
Read-write culture and free culture - demanding freedom in what we create, like Richard Stallman. The internet has enabled this new read-write culture. It's not just one culture, but two, both very different. One is a new version of read-only - massively efficient to sell and consume mass culture created elsewhere. Apple is the poster child for this: iTunes only lets you play stuff you buy from Apple, only for the iPod. Trying to perfect the copyright of content being consumed at a mass scale. Then there are those companies that exist to empower people to share their own content.
He shows anime clips edited to music - mashups of anime films to new music, including anime muppet hunter D- mahna mahna. Brilliant examples of remix culture - (I've got to find that).
White album inspires Jay-Z's Black album, mixed together by Danger Mouse as Grey Album.
Remixing religion - Jesus Christ, the Musical. Jesus video of "I Will Survive."
Remixing politics: atmo.se video of George Bush and Tony Blair performing "Endless Love."
We need to recognize that writing words is the Latin of our modern times. Video and sound are the vulgar languages of the common people, tools for speaking with power - a new potential to speak, learn, a new literacy that's reviving the read-write culture.
Two cultures, both products of the Internet, both different. The law's attitude towards them is different. Copyright law loves read-only, hates read-write, weakens it, in the current way it's architected. Using content digitally creates new copies of it, and that requires permission from the owners, so say the law. That conflict would be bad enough, but it's exacerbated by the war to protect the read-only business model. It could kill the potential of read-write culture. That's why many of us are resisting this, fighting this.
How do you resist? Let's litigate, file lawsuits. Tried that, but congress can do what it wants, so going to court to defend free culture was just simply wrong. Instead, we needed to incite a public movement to cause justices to understand the value of free culture, so the political system will wake up to it.
Two steps:
Practice free culture, show its value in 1000 different contexts;
Enable free culture, make it possible everywhere, beyond the hacker world.The practice of free culture is what Wikipedia is all about. This would have been impossible to do in a 20th century mindset. There are lessons that we should learn about how this is all made possible. If you look over the last 50 years, there's a repeated pattern. Look at interoperability - a proprietary instinct is natural, but freedom is a more important value. Consumers reject the idea of control. It's much better for society and innovation that there's interoperability and free standards encouraging the widest range of competition and the widest number of participants. That's the lesson of the last generation.
But we also need to enable a platform of free culture. We have to make it possible for this infrastructure to grow, and there's a threat to this freedom, a clear and present danger. Jack Valenti calls it a terrorist war - except the terrorists are kids remixing media. When they build the locks to protect the read-only internet, that will lock out the potential of the read-write internet. So we need to join Free Software Foundation to fight DRM, support free culture and free software, because they enable each other. There as important steps that all of us should take to facilitate free culture.
We need to enable a legal platform that protects free culture. We came up with the Creative Commons movement, stealing the ideas of Richard Stallman to use copyright law to carve out a space for freedom. Shift the default from all rights reserved to some rights reserved. They have a human element - a simple common deed, a legal element for lawyers, and a machine-readable element that computers can understand. Google and Yahoo use this machine-readable element to integrate CC into search engines. Now we're porting the legal layer for different jurisdictions around the world. There are now 140 million linkbacks to CC licenses as of last June. Content that explicitly says, We're free for you to use - and protects it in the legal code.
But the legal code is not free culture - you are free culture. The legal code is just plumbing, like tcp/ip. The culture is built on top of it, taking real work by real people. Licenses are nothing more than tools to minimize the harm of outdated legal systems. We need to make it seamless for people to do what they want to do in a simple way and make the lawyers as small as possible. You have ignited the imagination of the possibilities more than anyone in the world. Yochai's book pours all sorts of praise on Wikipedia. He's not a guy who gets obsessed but he's obsessed with you, in how the network is enabling creativity. You should feel his praise and feel proud of. That's why I'm here too.
But I'm also here to plea with you to see what power you have and use it to do good, to enable free culture. Help others spread the practice that Wikipedia exemplifies. PD-Wiki project is doing this. It'll launch in Canada, where the company with the database of all public domain Canadian content, then invite the community to build content around it - critiques, bios, lesson plans, etc. On top of this Wiki, there will be an API to let anyone figure out what's in the public domain and what's not. It'll excite more people to the idea of free culture.
Then, demand a useable platform for freedom. I was talking with Jimbo Wales over bad coffee, walking in a park, about the lack of interoperability between free culture projects - islands of freedom. But they can't talk to each other. They can't interact. You can't take Wikipedia and mix it with a CC sharealike license. It's bad design. My first instinct was control - convert everyone to a CC license. But as I listened to Jimbo and his ethic, I realized that was a mistake. You don't need a monopoly. You need a layer, like the tcp/ip layer, that allows content to move to and fro, find equivalents of similar licenses. Connect the FDL license with CC-BY-SA license. Derivatives from one license currently can't be used under another license. But a solution would be to facilitate an infrastructure where content licensed under one license can be distributed under another license in derivative form. An ecology of legal code to facilitate the functionality of different licenses. No one architecture would control everything, no single point of failure if a license is overturned by a court. And it would create a market signal of what licenses are valued by people. That signal is a discipline to the people who provide this plumbing to make it as good as it can be. A legal layer that would allow people to do what they want.
Creative Commons isn't the entity to run this structure. Instead, invite license authors to add a clause to allow derivatives under equivalent licenses. Someone like the software freedom law center could be the ones to do it.
Sometimes I'm optimistic, sometimes I'm not. But you have influence over this. You can help decide what's the best system and demand it. It's not just good for you, but good for all people who want to support free culture. The good you could do here is extraordinary. If we don't solve this soon, it's an environmental problem we'll face in the near future, where islands of creativity can't interact. You could do good here; you should do good here.
Tom Brokaw says my parents generation was the greatest generation, but they lived in the weirdest century. But there were a few people who got it. David Clark said "we reject kings, presidents and voting- we believe in rough consensus and running code." Richard Stallman then said, "If we don't want to live in a jungle, we must change our attitudes, that a good citizen is one who wants to cooperate when it's appropriate."
It's an honor to address you, but I plead with you to use your power to do good beyond Wikipedia in the name of free culture.
Posted by acarvin at August 4, 2006 2:56 PM
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