I just finished reading Larry Lessig’s latest book ‘Remix’ on copyright in the Internet era. Much like his other books on the subject, Lessig lays out the case for why copyright law is broken and ultimately harmful to the production and consumption of culture and knowledge. The Girl Talk song I’ve posted is a great example of the failings of the current system and the need for revised Fair Use doctrine and is one of the initial cases discussed in the book.
Three things that really stood out to me were:
1. We need to re-frame the discussion of copyright around a metaphor other than ‘War’ (i.e. the War on Piracy). It is constraining and ultimately more harmful than helpful. Media companies and copyright law need to be more modest in regulation by simplifying copyright law, de-regulating amateur creativity and decriminalizing file-sharing (which to the RIAA’s credit they are finally coming around to). Ultimately this can lead to more creativity, innovation and revenue.
2. That the ‘hybrid economy’ - that is the “commercial” and “sharing” economies - can co-exist and in fact complement each other. The important thing is to create frameworks that allow this complementary benefit to arise. Examples he cites are Google, Netflix and Amazon where user actions (searches, clicks, purchases) help drive value to the community at large and the user in specific.
3. When one looks at the sharing economics there are what he calls two basic types, “thin sharing economies” and “thick sharing economies”. “Thin sharing economies” refers to more simple self motivated sharing actions - basically “people contribute to the common good as a by-product of doing what the would otherwise want to do.” “Thick sharing economies” have a broader set of motivations at work - think contributing an article to Wikipedia or working on an open source software project. Both are necessary components to a sharing economy but being able to distinguish between the two is important in constructing systems that ultimately survive.
As I mentioned in my previous post media discovery is broken and a big reason for this is existing copyright law and how the record labels have tried to litigate against these broken laws. Ultimately I believe that even before the law is fully modified, the record labels are going to realize that there is not nearly enough sharing of music going on right now online. I don’t mean file sharing, I mean music sharing. Sharing your listening stream so that others in your social graph can discover this music as well and listen to it. I think the thinking in this book points to some of the important legal and business frameworks that need to be adjusted to realize the full potential of the sharing economy. Which ultimately will generate a lot of revenue for the music industry - but maybe not the big labels. Oh well.