Lawrence Lessig has been called the “most important thinker on intellectual property in the digital age” and claims that our country’s “war of prohibition” on file sharing has been a failure, turning teenagers who share music files into criminals. He urges us to ditch old, restrictive copyright laws and formulate new ways to ensure that “stuff that should be paid for” is paid for and “things that should be free” are freely shared.
Lessig argues that while we must respect creators in our new “sharing economy” so that they have the incentive to create something new, we must also recognize that we live in a new “hybrid” economy that allows commercial entities to leverage these sharing economies.
MY SMALL PART IN THE “SHARING ECONOMY”:
U-101 offers an example from my own experience of how material I wrote was leveraged and reused in this new economy. When I worked for Accepted.com, I wrote a few articles for their website. Once Accepted.com paid me to write them, they owned the words. Others asked if they could reprint the articles on their own websites. Accepted.com agreed to freely share the material, as long as the original author and publishing organization were credited and linked to. A win-win situation for both parties.
In this segment of “Alvin’s Educational Technology Blog”, Alvin Trusty discusses some fascinating and topical cultural examples that help us think about copyright in our new era. For example, Obama photo art as an example of a “derivative” or a “remix”.
Alvin also offers us a helpful primer on Creative Commons (as well as other entries on copyright).
The New York Times has addressed remix, mash-up culture in a number of articles and resources. ArtsBeat offers us a good basic discussion of the history of this trend, along with some interesting examples in “A Mash-up Culture: Ten to Watch” (March 17, 2010).
The Creative Commons website offers a clear explanation of what they’re trying to do in a video entitled, “A Shared Culture.”