Remix: Making Art and Commerce thrive in the Hybrid Economy - by Lawrence Lessig

[BridgeTheGap]

For more than a decade, we’ve been waging a war on our kids in the name of the 20th Century’s model of “copyright law.” In this, the last of his books about copyright, Lawrence Lessig maps both a way back to the 19th century, and to the promise of the 21st. Our past teaches us about the value in “remix.” We need to relearn the lesson. The present teaches us about the potential in a new “hybrid economy” — one where commercial entities leverage value from sharing economies. That future will benefit both commerce and community. If the lawyers could get out of the way, it could be a future we could celebrate.

http://remix.lessig.org/

Fresh Air interview with Lessig (12/22/2008):
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98591002

Book reviews by the Independent (UK)
Remix,By Lawrence Lessig
Little Brother, By Cory Doctorow

Apparently, they're scratching their heads in the Transition Team: what exactly do we do with ten million e-mail registrants to barackobama.com? While the current talk is all about rights and privacy and the correct use of citizens' information, perhaps the question should be reversed. What will those ten million do with Barack Obama?


If the account of the digital generation given in both of these books is accurate, then the new connected constituency that partly pushed the Obamacrats over the line will be neither mute nor tractable. The campaign phrase "Yes We Can" was both a lift from Cesar Chavez's Mexican migrant labour movement of the Seventies ("Si se puede!"), and a crisp summation of the experience of the Net-Gens – where the right to cultural consumption and expression, and civic activism, is an icon-click away. "Yes we can vote once every four years" is unlikely to be their mantra for the new adminstration.

Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow outline the energy and dynamism of these "netizens" in different ways. And they have different kinds of cautionary advice for politicians struggling to make the most of their irrepressible activism. Strikingly, both Remix (a lucid academic work on technology and copyright) and Little Brother (a schlocky but ideas-packed teen potboiler) are motivated by the same initial anxiety. Why are we criminalising a generation of youth for being creative with new technology?

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/remixby-lawrence-lessigbr-little-brother-by-cory-doctorow-1037787.html