Remix

Over the years, I’ve noticed articles about file-sharing and music piracy tend to be rather blasé about the downside (loss of income to creators, publishers, music companies); they simply brush it off with an airy “Well, illegal downloads are here to stay, so creators had better get used to it”—without any suggestion how to accomplish that.
Lawrence Lessig’s Remix is a pleasant surprise, in that while Lessig believes file-sharing, downloading and noncommercial use in general should be decriminalized (and copyright law heavily revamped), he does believe copyright serves an important purpose in making sure professionals get paid for their work. He also has actual suggestions for how musicians could be compensated for downloading. One theory—not original to him—is that the downloading systems keep track of what gets “stolen”; Congress taxes the system in some fashion; and out of this tax, musicians/movie makers are compensated based on how much traffic they generate (I’ve heard other alternatives, but this one seems more likely to find support).
As a writer, this is of great interest; some friends of mine, for instance, found their ebooks available as “free downloads” on an unauthorized website a while back (the site owner also encouraged PayPal donations to himself—I’d say that would put him in the commercial category, which is the kind of piracy Lessig wants continually penalized).
As a reader and movie buff, it’s also of interest: Lessig points out that a lot of material can’t be published or DVDed because ownership of the copyright is unclear, or the copyright holder has gone out of business and there’s nobody who can give permission. Lessig suggests that making initial copyright automatic (as it is now) and requiring someone file for extensions would ensure that “lost” copyrights would slide into the public domain.
I do wish Lessig had focused more on print; fan-fic, after all, was ignoring copyright more than 20 years before Napster. Instead, his main emphasis on print is to point out how much more liberal the rules are (you can excerpt a short quote from a copyrighted book without problems but there’s no allowance for even the briefest movie clip to be used without securing permission). Still, this doesn’t undermine his arguments; I presume fanfic and fan movies with copyrighted characters would be permissible in his eyes as long as the use was noncommercial (though I do think some sort of compensation scheme similar to the downloading idea would be good [harder to pull off, though]).
I don’t know that I agree with Lessig that if noncommercial use is unlimited, Warners can then wash its hands if, say, the American Nazi Party starts using Harry Potter clips to draw people to its website (ditto NAMBLA, Westboro Baptist Church, or at a tamer level, political parties, Planned Parenthood, or National Right to Life). For one thing, I’m not sure “Hey, we can’t stop them!” will really protect the brand; for another, the idea of the Nazis or homophobes using my work is something I’d like to be able to protect against (and I think right-wingers who object to seeing their work on PFLAG or PETA websites are similarly entitled).
Still, it’s an excellent, thought-provoking book—though given how much copyright law is shaped by major corporations (it’s sometimes referred to as “Mickey Mouse law”—every time Disney is close to losing copyright on Mickey, it lobbies for an extension) I don’t know how much impact it’ll have. Even when the kids who’ve grown up downloading reach positions of power, will they feel the urge to change the law for the benefit of artists (certainly Lessig’s proposal would be better than the current set-up) or continue to treat digital piracy as acceptable law-breaking like speeding?
Either way, the book is well worth reading.