For the past decade, Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford Law School, has been an iconoclastic voice for copyright reform. In his new book, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (Penguin, 2008), Lessig argues that copyright law has not kept up with innovation and is holding it back. Remix focuses on the Internet arena, with Lessig arguing for the need to revise copyright so as to enable innovation and create new markets. The Internet, Lessig says, has intertwined the art people create and the art people appropriate. It therefore requires new copyright rules.
Lessig is also actively involved in developing new approaches to copyright. He's a founder of Creative Commons, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that helps companies and individuals navigate the unexplored areas between full copyright, in which all rights are reserved, and public domain, in which none are. Creative Commons' licenses are intended to help producers retain copyright yet also allow copyrighted work to be remixed or repurposed. The licenses let the creators of a work of art, or software, control what others can do with the material they've created. Some licenses permit anything, others allow some changes in some circumstances and still others have different rules for for-profit and not-for-profit remixing. These are timely ideas, given the way the Internet allows for "mashups"
What is a mashup? It's a term that implies more than one medium has been combined together. Think of watching a video that has had its original soundtrack removed and replaced with another. Or, a more specific example: There's an application out there that allows people to take images from Flickr, a photo-sharing Web site, and impose them over images from Google Maps.
The friction between artistic and technical innovation and rights holders is an old one, but Lessig believes copyright law can evolve in response to 21st-century technologies. "There's a lot of crying and screaming at any moment of significant technical change," he says. "Those who are flourishing and prospering from the current technology are the loudest screamers. But the market quickly figures out how to profit in the context of the new technology, and pretty soon into the battle, the competitive system drives people to focus on how to make money rather than how to try to stop progress. That's what's beginning to happen right now."
There are plenty of examples of rights holders benefiting from the work of subsequent innovators. Under U.S. copyright law, for example, compulsory licenses require rights holders for songs to let others use their work, as long as there's adequate compensation. As a result, the music industry has long had cover versions of older songs: A performer is re-imagining an original work. Lessig advocates something similar for today's mashup makers. "These artists mix together a whole bunch of different bits of creativity and create something new out of it. What we need for them is what people who do cover versions have the right to: nondiscriminatory access to the bits of culture that might be put together to produce something interesting or new and compelling."