Lessig Read-Write Culture Video

direct link to page for video: click here

Begun with a quote by John Philip Sousa, Lessig's interesting narrative about copyright in today's society discusses the different aspects of read-only culture and read-write culture and their effects on creativity in the 21st century.

Sousa was afraid that technology would eliminate culture's "vocal cords," by which he meant that society would gradually lose its creative drive. Because people no longer needed to sing songs in order to hear music (the phonographs would sing for them), they would inherently lose the ability to sing all together. While he may not have meant that people's vocal cords would literally disappear, he did worry that technology would eventually rid society of the need to be creative. People would buy other people's creativity, and become dull and lazy themselves due to a lack of a need to do anything for themselves. In other words, he was concerned that society would become a read-only culture.

A read-only culture is a culture in which the majority of the population purchases creative works created by the minority of the population. With today's copyright laws, purchases such as these buy only the right "consume," and nothing else. Consumers are not given the right to re-issue the work or to sell it or even to copy it. In fact, such acts are illegal according to the law. Because major companies such as Apple, Amazon, and eBooks so strongly encourage the consumption of such works, the read-only culture is the one we are most familiar with today.

A read-write culture is a culture in which people are able to buy or consume and build upon works created by other people. While the idea is enticing and seems harmless, current copyright laws nearly prohibit people from doing this.
Copyright laws prevent people from stealing and copying artists' work in ways that steal profit from the original creators. It is a helpful tool in keeping their creative works guarded and safe, but the regulations of the laws are complicated and hard to follow.

In order to use a copy of any work, permission from the owner of the copyright is needed. The problem with this is that not only is the permission difficult to get, but also that when permission is granted, it often comes at a high price -- one that people trying to express their own creativity by building upon works of others can rarely afford.

This system of copyright laws, although slightly complicated, was practical enough before technology became such a dominant force. Objects such as books could be bought and then, because copyright laws had no means of regulating what happened to the books after their purchase, could be resold, or burned, or be read aloud to groups of people around a campfire. These uses were covered by free use because there was no way for the copyright owners to watch each individual work. Because technology has such an imminent presence in society today, most creative works are purchased on computers. As a result, every use of the work is a copy of it, even if only in the RAM of the computer. For this reason, most people can't go an hour, on average, without breaking some form of a copyright law.

It was also easier because once the copyright was granted, it lasted for 14 years. Now, copyright is granted until the death of the creator plus a number of years. Another barrier to the read-write culture is that in 1976, copyright law changed. Prior to this year, works were copyrighted only by an opt-in process, meaning that authors had to actually place copyrights on their works. Now, unless the author decides to opt out of the copyright law, their work is automatically granted 100 years of copyright.

As though it wasn't already confusing or difficult enough, there are exceptions to the copyright law. That is, certain things that the law could regulate but leaves open. If somebody wishes to criticize a work, or wishes to educate others about it, then these acts are covered by fair use. The laws regarding this, however, are also complicated and unclear.

People who try to copy works without the intention of causing any harm to the original creator -- people who remix pictures, sounds, and video to create something that is original -- often face problems with copyright law. Permission is needed to use each picture, sound, and video, and because of this and the difficulty of obtaining this permission, the creativity of these people is stifled.

The system of copyright laws was not made for this type of society. As an attempt to fix this issue, something called a Creative Commons license was created. It is a license that authors are allowed to place on their work that specifically states what consumers can and cannot do with their work. With the license comes three separate legal contracts: one that is readable by the average person, clearly stating the rights that come with consuming that product, one that is readable by lawyers so that those rights can be enforceable, and one that is computer readable so that search engines (such as Google and Yahoo) can filter searches for Creative Commons content.

This Creative Commons license became international and after only three years, 45 million licenses were released. An example of how the Creative Commons licensing works is this: a guitar track was written, played, recorded, and released with this license. A seventeen-year-old girl downloaded the track and added a violin track to play with it. She recorded and re-released the song with the license. No harm, no foul.

In short, the problem in this read-write culture is the system under which copyright laws currently work. Copyright itself is great in that it prevents authors from being harmed or stolen from, but the currently system of the laws makes it too complicated and fuzzy to understand. Therefore, in order to encourage and allow a culture in which creativity is not only made but also is able to be built upon, the laws need to change.