A Lawrence by Any Other Name

Score one for Amanda.

After living with a computer-inclined person for more than 12 years now, the knowledge I had on the subject has always taken a back seat to the more capable hands of Lawrence, "Larry" the Computer Guy. It's not that I'm not technically inclined, I'm just not -as- technically inclined as some. So, as ducks go to water and I drift toward the creative, so Larry drifts toward bits of code and hardware.

But today, my friends, while armed with "Remix," by Lawrence Lessig, I found out something the "computer smart-one" didn't already know. Mind you, it was something that could be classified as trivia, but still: I knew how Apache got its name first in my household (see page 164 if I've piqued your interest). Sometimes it's the small victories that keep us going.

Let me change gears slightly from self-congratulating mode.

Never before had I thought about copyright laws for so long. It's been the big assumption of a lot of my life, professionally speaking: Make sure you have permission to run that photo, to run that story, to run that image. Granted, I was working at a newspaper, so a lot of Lessig's ideas don't necessarily apply since we were for-profit. The future I could imagine with Lessig's proposals to overhaul our current system actually inspires me. The lightbulb on the creative side of my brain lit up when reading this book -- yes, people should be able to share and create in the spirit of culture rather than the spirit of capitalism. For once in this semester, I'm actually optimistic about the effect ideas coming from this book could have.

Culture, technology, ideas -- these all grow from sharing and communicating. Innocentive knows that more minds and contributions are better than fewer, and they have proven results. Their results have actually brought good changes to the world, so why not apply that same mode of thinking to books, music, and art?


Mind you, there's still that tiny voice in the back of my brain telling me why greed and end result of profit will get in the way, but it's a smaller and softer voice than what my kindred spirit Evgeny Morosov stirred. I remember how angry and litigious Metallica became at the height of the Napster scandal in the mid-2000s. That's certainly going to happen again.

But I think to Lessig's example of Harry Potter. By letting kids (or anyone, really) take clips, artwork, etc from the books, the brand became more valuable.  It was shared as much as it was embraced by its audience. This could happen to any creative endeavor, if it's worth sharing. Yes, there will always be the issue of compensation, but I believe people will pay for the good stuff.  Misters Hammett and Hetfield, I never stole your music. And there was a good reason for that.