New Media Research Studio

THE  MOVIE

With the initial internet boom, and Web 2.0, anyone could use other people’s content to build on, and then share that content universally. With such a free type of media, power to control what was being said and used was very much decentralized.

Lessig spoke about how the United States was founded as a nation of free speech, equality and democracy. The control of the internet is in opposition to the ideals of this country, but, Lessig argues, the loss of control that the Internet provides creates an anxiety in the media and the political world.

Today, anyone with a laptop and some basic software can create, use or alter any type of media, and use a free platform to put it into the media world. This type of power creates a “bottom-up democracy, a blog democracy,” with increasing peer to peer communication, and is reminiscent of the read-write culture that the United States once was.

However, there are three threats to this new form of speech:

1) Certain ideals are lost in this new form of media

2) Networks want to keep control over their content

3) Increased government regulation of internet…. Infrastructure of control can lead to censorship

Everyone is raised with a set of values, and that influences their opinion on more or less control with the internet.

THE BOOK

There are two schools of thought on copyright laws:

1) All rights reserved–no one can use copyrighted material without permission

2) No rights reserved –everyone can use copyrighted material, regardless

With the advent of the Internet, initially, there was no control over rights so it followed the ‘no rights reserved’ school of thought. After much restructuring, rights were back to (mostly) being protected on the net. Lessig is proposing something in the middle, to respect copyrights, but still allow for creativity using online content.

Lexis Nexis (and similar services) charge a fee for convenience. Surely, we can go to the library and find a certain supreme court decision in a book, but it takes a lot of time and energy. For a fee, Lexis Nexis gives you an easily searchable database. Lessig’s problem with this type of database is that, eventually, what if this type of database is the only way to get certain information? As journals are becoming exclusively electronic, publishers don’t want libraries to have access.

Creative Commons is a corporation dedicated to maintaining reasonable copyright, while still allowing for a much freer flow of information on the web. Content is tagged with a license, but can still be used for creative building and innovation.

Creative commons wants to establish “a legal license, a human-readable description, and machine-readable tags” which would make up a Creative Commons license. Lessig sees CC as a compromise between “all” and “no” copyrights online. The problem that he sees is that laws are being used that were created when the internet (or computers or anything digital) were inconceivable. CC licenses are useful because they are “some rights reserved” but allow for creativity and a freedom of information. CC complements copyright law, and allows for an inexpensive flexibility of information

Lessig’s problems with, and proposed changes to today’s system:

1) The problem with copyright law is that there is no formal process for getting a copyright, but if the intellectual property is your creation, then you hold the creative rights to it. With the internet, information moves so quickly and changes at such a pace that it is difficult to see where information originated and to whom it belongs. The only answer, as Lessig sees it, is that the law must be changed, that we need the formality of a document that claims ownership.

2) The problem of ‘marking’ arises as well (some sort of mark of copyright or ownership on online content), and Lessig proposes that not all media need be marked in the same way. He suggests some type of mark that makes it easy to identify who owns the rights to content and whether it is free or not.

3) Terms need to be shorter as well, as the current term for corporate copyright is 95 years. These terms need to be shorter and there needs to be a clear distinction between “ideas” and “expression”

4) Corporations need to be checked up on. When a corporation has a 95-year term, they need to periodically be asked if they want to keep their rights.

5) Hindsight is 20/20. We can’t change the fact that there are 95-year terms that are currently being held, so we need to look to the future for change.

Lessig addresses the problem with music, file sharing and piracy as well:

-Eventually, when the whole world is connected to the internet all the time, that file sharing, downloading and storing music and content will be a thing of the past, that it will be much easier to subscribe or preview music than to keep it.

-Lawmakers shouldn’t be worried about Net regulation with file sharing, but how to make sure artists get paid for their work

-Harvard Professor William Fisher suggests a way to not have to worry about file sharing while artists are compensated:

1) content would be marked with a digital watermark

2) entrepreneurs would develop systems to monitor how many items of each content were distributed.

3) artists would be compensated on the basis of those numbers

4) The compensation would come from an appropriate tax

My take on this:  Creative Commons is a good idea.  It’s definitely not fair that content, potentially, is not available to us because we have to pay for it, whereas 20 years ago it would’ve been available in the local library.  However, I feel like Lessig’s argument that Creative Commons ‘compliments’ or works in tandem with the current system won’t fly as an argument.  The society we live in is very “pick one side or the other.”  We have to be yes-no on everything, and can’t find the middle ground to compromise.