Remix - Softcover

Lessig, Lawrence

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1408113473 ISBN 13: 9781408113479

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008

Synopsis

Lawrence Lessig, the reigning authority on intellectual property in the Internet age, spotlights the newest and possibly the most harmful culture war-a war waged against our children and others who create and consume art. Copyright laws have ceased to perform their original, beneficial role: protecting artists' creations while allowing them to build on previous creative works. In fact, our system now criminalises those very actions.

By embracing "read-write culture," which allows its users to create art as readily as they consume it, we can ensure that creators get the support-artistic, commercial, and ethical-that they deserve and need. Indeed, we can already see glimmers of a new hybrid economy that combines the profit motives of traditional business with the "sharing economy" evident in such websites as Wikipedia and YouTube. The hybrid economy will become ever more prominent in every creative realm-from news to music-and Lessig shows how we can and should use it to benefit those who make and consume culture.

Remix is an urgent, eloquent plea to end a war that harms our children and other intrepid creative users of new technologies. It also offers an inspiring vision of the post-war world where enormous opportunities await those who view art as a resource to be shared openly rather than a commodity to be hoarded.

About this title

About the Author

Lawrence Lessig is Professor of Law at Harvard University and Directory of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics. He was previously a professor at Stanford Law School and founder of the School's Center for Internet and Society. He is the author of Free Culture, The Future of Ideas, and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, and is a columnist at Wired. Scientific American named him as one of the Top 50 Visionaries and he has also been included several times in BusinessWeek's 'eBiz 25': the twenty-five most influential people in electronic business. Lessig is a founding board member of Creative Commons and a board member of the Software Freedom Law Center. Lessig serves on the boards of Creative Commons, MAPLight, Brave New Film Foundation, Change Congress, The American Academy, Berlin, Freedom House and iCommons.org.

From Publishers Weekly

Should anyone besides libertarian hackers or record companies care about copyright in the online world? In this incisive treatise, Stanford law prof and Wired columnist Lessig (Free Culture) argues that we should. He frames the problem as a war between an old read-only culture, in which media megaliths sell copyrighted music and movies to passive consumers, and a dawning digital read-write culture, in which audiovisual products are freely downloaded and manipulated in an explosion of democratized creativity. Both cultures can thrive in a hybrid economy, he contends, pioneered by Web entities like YouTube. Lessig's critique of draconian copyright laws—highlighted by horror stories of entertainment conglomerates threatening tweens for putting up Harry Potter fan sites—is trenchant. (Why, he asks, should sampling music and movies be illegal when quoting texts is fine?) Lessig worries that too stringent copyright laws could stifle such remix masterpieces as a powerful doctored video showing George Bush and Tony Blair lip-synching the song Endless Love, or making scofflaws of America's youth by criminalizing their irrepressible downloading. We leave this (copyrighted) book feeling the stakes are pretty low, except for media corporations. (Oct. 20)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1408113473
• ISBN 13: 9781408113479
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352