Larry Lessig, a professor of law at Stanford Law School and co-founder of Creative Commons, has a new book coming out.
Remix is to be published by The Penguin Press this week. In it he argues that digital technology has made it easy to create new works from existing art, but copyright law has yet to catch up. And that the criminalization of our kids is “corrupting of the very idea of the rule of law.”
An essay adapted from the book appeared yesterday in the Wall Street Journal:
The return of this “remix” culture could drive extraordinary economic growth, if encouraged, and properly balanced. It could return our culture to a practice that has marked every culture in human history — save a few in the developed world for much of the 20th century — where many create as well as consume. And it could inspire a deeper, much more meaningful practice of learning for a generation that has no time to read a book, but spends scores of hours each week listening, or watching or creating, “media.”
Yet our attention is not focused on these creators. It is focused instead upon “the pirates.” We wage war against these “pirates”; we deploy extraordinary social and legal resources in the absolutely failed effort to get them to stop “sharing.”
This war must end. It is time we recognize that we can’t kill this creativity. We can only criminalize it. We can’t stop our kids from using these tools to create, or make them passive. We can only drive it underground, or make them “pirates.” And the question we as a society must focus on is whether this is any good. Our kids live in an age of prohibition, where more and more of what seems to them to be ordinary behavior is against the law. They recognize it as against the law. They see themselves as “criminals.” They begin to get used to the idea.
That recognition is corrosive. It is corrupting of the very idea of the rule of law. And when we reckon the cost of this corruption, any losses of the content industry pale in comparison.
He says copyright law must change and offers up 5 suggestions:
- Deregulate amateur remix: when no money is involved, let is be.
- Deregulate “the copy”: the internet is the perfect copy machine. Don’t focus on the copy, focus on the money copyright law was intended to foster.
- Simplify: the law that now purports to regulate everyone with a computer is impossibly complex.
- Restore efficiency: return to the system of that obligates the copyright holder to renew after an automatic, 14-year initial term.
- Decriminalize Gen-X: build upon a host of proposals that would assure that artists get paid without trying to stop “sharing.”
RELATED: Freedom to Tinker takes apart the claim that “counterfeiting and piracy” cost the US economy as much as $250 billion.