I agree, Lessig is a voice in the wilderness raising important issues about intellectual property that will need to be addressed as society becomes more and more digitized and networked.
The Creative Commons would be a great idea (like BMI as Lessig argues) only if it had the capitalistic machinery behind it to get Creative Commons works exposed via things like radio stations. Creative Commons is also in desperate need of filtering, something that the average person is not willing to do. When I see creative commons today I think to myself "Oh great, more content with a Creative Crap license" because the quality to crap ratio for artists that use CC leans way too far towards the crap end of the spectrum.
So, how do high quality creative commons artists get promoted? They don't. There is no viable commercial organization that is filtering, organizing, and pushing that content to a place where the general public will ever experience it. So, yes, CC is a nice ideal for those who use it, but it's not currently the BMI that Lessig is hyping it to be (and it has been around for a long while now).
Lessig's more important crusade imho has been against the ever extending length of copyright terms that went from about 14 years at its inception, to the current life of the author + 75 years after the author's death. That is the single biggest problem for the issue of "remixing". Admittedly however, some of Lessig's examples of remixing problems are red herrings that are not illegal under the current copyright regime, thanks to fair use provisions (particularly those "remixes" that are political in nature).
Photographers here are finding their works on other web sites all the time. Lessig might argue that such use could become promotion for the photographer, but I doubt he's ever done any research to see if any real business actually comes from photographic (or other kinds of) piracy. Lessig is so into the music world, where people generally want to know the name of the cool band their listening to and "viral marketing" can help a career, but he ignores other generas of copyrighted material like photography that don't enjoy such "viral marketing" benefits. Just ask yourself, how many bands/musicians can the average person name off the top of their head? How many photographers aside from AA? So, I'm a bit luke-warm on the latest "value added"/"viral marketing" directions he has taken since it only works in a narrow band of situations (pun intended). |
