Lessig on remix culture

At O'Reilly Media, there's an interview with Lawrence Lessig on Remix Culture.

Because the issues Prof. Lessig raises are so central to the battle over digital rights, I'll quote from the article at length. Excerpts:

What do you get when you mix P2P, inexpensive digital input devices, open source software, easy editing tools, and reasonably affordable bandwidth? Potentially, you get what Lawrence Lessig calls remix culture: a rich, diverse outpouring of creativity based on creativity. This is not a certain future, however. Peer-to-peer is on the verge of being effectively outlawed. Continuation of the current copyright regime would mean that vast quantities of creative content will be forever locked away from remix artists.

Lessig is joining the battle for the remix future on several fronts: the court battle on the legality of P2P; another legal battle to free "orphan works" from their copyright gulag; rolling out new Creative Commons "sampling licenses" with the help of big-name artists like David Byrne; and supporting the "free culture" work of Brazilian musician and culture minister Gilberto Gil toward a society based on freedom of culture. ...

What's the most critical area facing the Commons right now?

Lessig: Right now, it's the continued legality of peer-to- peer technologies. The reason this has become so important is that the type of content that is getting mixed and shared is increasingly shifting to large-file video content. As it gets shared, relying on an infrastructure that keeps the cost of delivery low becomes essential. So if you're a filmmaker and you have a great new documentary film you want to make available on the internet, if you post it on your web site and it becomes successful, then you go bankrupt. If you can use peer-to-peer to distribute it, you can shift the cost of distribution to the recipient. So this infrastructure becomes essential to a certain kind of creativity in the future. Whether that's going to be possible in the future is going to turn on what the Supreme Court does. ...

If you can pull somebody into court under some vague standard of liability just because the tools are being used by people to create copyright infringement, that's a very good way to block new innovation that might change the way copyright material gets distributed. So it's a strategic opportunity to exercise control over the future of content development and distribution, and not so much as a way of protecting copyrights. ...

So the idea that people with a Sony videocam who are trying to make a little documentary about something going on in their hometown that they'll share on the internet with anybody who wants to get access to it ... the idea that those people have to live by the same rules that 20th Century Fox lives by is crazy. The rules that 20th Century Fox lives by are crazy, but at least a big company like Fox can afford the legal costs to bear the burden of those rules. ...

If you think about the ways kids under 15 using digital technology think about writing--you know, writing with text is just one way to write, and not even the most interesting way to write. The more interesting ways are increasingly to use images and sound and video to express ideas. Well, all of those ways of writing under the law as it's understood right now are basically illegal unless you secure permission from the author up front. So the same act of creativity in some sense, you know, taking, creating, mixing out of what other people do, is legal in the text world and illegal in the digital media world. And the struggle is to get people to recognize that there's no good reason for the rules to be so radically different between the two contexts, and that we ought to be encouraging a wider range of creativity using digital media--both because there are many people who would be extraordinarily talented in exploiting those types of creativity, and also because it would really spur growth in collective literacy about how media itself functions and how it has its effect. ...

There's a vast amount of content that is locked up by copyright now for no purpose at all. It's just locked up because the system has become lazy about distinguishing between content that needs the benefit of an exclusive right and content that doesn't. ...

Slashdot is on the case too.