Lawrence Lessig on creative freedom and copyright

A TED video of Lessig’s speech (ca. 20 min) found via the Information Research blog. As the TED site puts it,

The Net’s most adored lawyer brings together John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights, and the “ASCAP cartel” to build a case for creative freedom. He pins down the key shortcomings of our dusty, pre-digital intellectual property laws, and reveals how bad laws beget bad code.

Here are a few notes:

-          Remixing content is “saying things differently.”

-          “In a digital world, every single use of culture produces a copy. Every single use, therefore, requires permission, without permission you are a trespasser…”

-          The current situation creates extremes on both sides of the argument, incl. a generation of copyright abolitionists.

-          Private solution, as opposed to one created by the government, in his view:

“First, that artists and creators embrace the idea – choose – that their work be made available more freely… Second, we need the businesses … to embrace this opportunity expressly to enable it, so that this ecology of free content, or freer content, can grow on a neutral platform… So that more free can compete with less free.”

Lessig finishes with what the wider implications for the society are:

“It is technology that has made [our kids] different [from us]. And as we see what this technology can do, we have to recognize you can’t kill the [??] of technology, you can only criminalize it. We can’t stop our kids from using it, we can only drive it underground. We can’t make our kids passive again, we can only make them, quote, pirates.”

Lessig is saying a lot that needed to be said.

I suspect part of the problem is that in our Western culture money often overshadows other measures of worth. The contents provider industry needs to shake up their business model before it’s too late (if it isn’t already). Some artists have already tried making their music available online with a pay-what-you-want agreement, although with varying degrees of success.

What does all this mean for libraries?

Online: More digital services, galleries, repositories, and databases, for sure. Downloadable content, content accessible over the connection (a la Netflix, for instance), or even home deliveries of physical materials, but on a scale far beyond the current one.

Onsite: I think John Blyberg is right: our users want a library experience. (As much as I hate the term.) He’s referring to a recent New York Times article that interviewed Louise Berry of Darien Library and Leslie Burger, among others. Burger says:

“There aren’t very many public spaces in our community anymore, places where people can congregate, be comfortable, think and interact with each other,” said Leslie Burger, director of the Princeton Public Library and a former president of the American Library Association. “It became pretty clear people were seeking those kinds of environments.”

That easily applies to academic libraries as well (why else would we be building cafes and lounges).