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A key change at iCommons
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Dear friends,
At the 2 August iCommons Board Meeting, the board decided to make some difficult but necessary changes at iCommons. It has become clear over the past months that our vision for iCommons is different from the... more
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Helping Artists Starve? Lessig moving
David Evan Harris · São Paulo (Brazil) · Jun 17th, 2007 8:34 pm · 14 votes · no comments made
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Helping Artists Starve?
The Sharing Economy and the Commercial Economy
In his keynote speech this evening, Lawrence Lessig gave a series of key messages to the Creative Commons movement. While the concrete announcement made within his half-hour talk was his desire to step away from center stage of the movement by leaving his board positions at the Free Software Foundation, Electronic Frontiers Foundation, Public Knowledge
Public Library of Science, and Music Brains and beginning to “step aside” within CC and iCommons, he also gave some very strong guiding words of caution and encouragement to the movement.
Lessig began by presenting two major critiques of the movement that he sees to be serious challenges to the movement’s success. Firstly is the erroneous public perception that what he and other CC activists are primarily concerned with is “helping people steal.” By framing CC as “anti-copyright” outside critics both misunderstand and hamper the movement’s success. Rather than confronting such critics directly, Lessig was more concerned with the effort to correct the predominant public perception that this is indeed the case.
The second major critique/misunderstanding of the movement presented by Lessig is the idea that CC is simply “helping artists starve.” By licensing their content under CC, critics from “rights collecting societies” such as CISAC, present a falsely black-and-white scenario wherein artists naively decide to CC license their work and lose out on the potentially lucrative gains to be had from their creative efforts.
To counter such criticisms, Lessig’s key point was on the importance of distinguishing between the “sharing economy” and the “commercial economy.”
Lessig emphasized that neither he nor the movement itself is opposed to the use or existence of the traditional copyright. With his Second Life simulcast being broadcast at his side, he pointed out to the audience of wifi-connected laptop-bearers that without traditional copyrights that guarantee a return on investment to certain cultural creators, we would live in a world without Star Wars.
Showing the slide below, Lessig pointed out that in many social relationships, the idea of introducing monetary exchanges is not only awkward, but even poisonous. “Britney Spears doesn’t charge her children when she sings to them,” he told the audience. Some sectors of society and social activity simply do not belong in the commercial activity—those areas where you are “doing it for the love of what you do and not for the money.”
The CC-BY and the CC-BY-SA licenses are particularly well suited for this sharing economy, with the science, culture and education sectors being the key areas where Lessig sees the sharing economy flourishing.
Crediting the concept of the “sharing economy” to Joi Ito, Lessig emphasized that it is not completely divorced from the commercial economy, and that, in fact, CC licensing can be used effectively as a tool to help artists “cross over into the commercial economy.”
In closing his keynote speech, Lessig likened his personal decision to move on from CC to the path of US presidential candidate, Barak Obama’s. After ten years as a politician, Obama told the press that he had decided that it was time for him to go “up or out,” running for president and if that didn’t work, getting out of the business all together.
For Lessig, “up” means a continuation of his action against a bigger and larger beast than the one he currently confronts. “The insanity about the copyright has nothing to do with the copyright—it’s about the economies of influence that control how government functions.” Pointing out the ways that powerful economic actors have derailed efforts to fight global warming and to promote health care in the United States, Lessig will be moving on to look at the ways that money has been fundamental to the failing of our governmental structures.
tags: dubrovnik croatia media-events lessig sharing-economy summit07
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