[A2k] Financial Times review of Larry Lessig's 'Remix'

[Thiru Balasubramaniam]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7dba0ee6-9662-11dd-9dce-000077b07658.html

Remix

Review by Lewis Jones

Published: October 13 2008 06:29 | Last updated: October 13 2008 06:29

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
By Lawrence Lessig
The Penguin Press $25.95, 328 pages

A public intellectual of zealous spirit, a skilful polemicist engaged
in the discourse of law, politics and the worldwide web =96 Lawrence
Lessig is a prophet for the internet age.

Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School, has spent the past decade
rallying global support from geeks and activists for reform of the
copyright laws. He has campaigned for Barack Obama, and has recently
announced that he will spend the next decade fighting the systemic
corruption of the United States Congress.

Bridging those two decades, Remix is both the summation of Lessig=92s
copyright campaign =96 which he has conducted in his column in Wired
magazine, and in books such as Free Culture =96 and the opening shot in
his battle with Congress.

He argues that copyright in its current form is archaic, ineffective
and stifling, a =93proprietary vault=94 guarded by government to protect
corporations. Between 1998 and June 2006 the Recording Industry
Association of America sued 17,587 people, including a 12-year-old
girl and a dead grandmother.

That official figure is only the tip of the iceberg. At Stanford, 90
per cent of students =93steal=94 music. Millions of young people =93mix=94 =
or
=93mash-up=94 samples of music and film to create new forms of expression
=96 all of them illegal.

The government defends the status quo with talk of a =93war on piracy=94,
which Lessig classifies as a =93metaphoric=94 war, comparable with the one
on drugs =96 equally unwinnable and self-defeating. =93In my view,=94 he
writes, =93the solution to an unwinnable war is not to wage war more
vigorously. At least when the war is not about survival, the solution
to an unwinnable war is to sue for peace, and then to find ways to
achieve without war the ends that the war sought. Criminalising an
entire generation is too high a price to pay ... =94

We should learn from the past, he says. In 1976 Universal and Disney
tried to criminalise the VCR, and lost, which was just as well for
them, as video sales and rentals have proved far more profitable than
the box office.

The internet offers three economic models =96 the commercial (Amazon),
the sharing (Wikipedia) and the hybrid (Red Hat, Second Life), which
Lessig defines as =93either a commercial entity that aims to leverage
value from a sharing economy, or it is a sharing economy that builds a
commercial entity to better support its sharing aims=94. Commerce should
realise that hybrid is the way to go, and copyright law should reflect
the new realities.

Lessig is a human embodiment of the hybrid principle, and has written
a splendidly combative manifesto =96 pungent, witty and persuasive. At
the end of it he explains why he is now taking this fight =96 and others
=96 to Washington: =93The simple reason we wage a hopeless war against our
kids is that they have less money to give to political campaigns than
Hollywood does ... Our government is fundamentally irrational for a
fundamentally rational reason: policy follows not sense, but dollars.=94

=91Remix=92 is one of six finalists for the Financial Times and Goldman
Sachs Business Book Award, to be announced on October 14. www.ft.com/bookaw=
ard

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Thiru Balasubramaniam
Geneva Representative
Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)
thiru@keionline.org


Tel: +41 22 791 6727
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