Molly Sheridan

By Matthew Guerrieri

I’ll concur up front with Lessig’s underlying argumentative framework: that copyright law, in its current state, is onerous and impractical, and that using the courts to determine IP licensing guidelines is ham-fisted and counterproductive.

There were two things, though, that I kept thinking while reading the book. They’re kind of related. The first has to do with Lessig’s whole idea that we need to decriminalize read/write culture–remixing, amateur mash-ups, &c.–because otherwise we’re branding creative activity as criminal. The parade of Western artistic activity (especially in the last century) has included no small number of outlaws and transgressors. Make certain activity legal–even activity that, in a sane world, should be legal–and there’s no shortage of artists (or artistic kids) who will simply seek out another illegal channel. Lessig’s interviewed artists all struck me as either unusually earnest or slightly disingenuous; the aesthetic frisson of rule-breaking is a constant in artistic history. (Do you think Shepard Fairey isn’t at least slightly pleased that Boston cops keep giving him a hard time?)

This might just seem like aesthetic posturing at the margins, but it’s salient to the other thing I kept thinking. If you look at the history of mass media–particularly since World War II, when mass media became lucrative enough to attract people more interested in profit than content–the most artistically rich and rewarding content has come during what might be called “nobody knows anything” periods, when technology and tastes changed too fast for corporate structure to keep up: rock-and-roll in the late 50s/early 60s, Hollywood in the late 60s/early 70s, pop music in the late 80s/early 90s (hip-hop and grunge), and so forth. If Lessig is right that hybrid economies–which leverage the community aspects of internet activity–are starting to emerge as workable corporate models, my instinct is that it signals the end of the current internet’s “nobody knows anything” phase, and online culture is about to get a lot more corporatized. Lessig uses Lucasfilm’s attempt to leverage community–accompanied by draconian licensing terms–as an example of a corporation that doesn’t “get it,” but who’s to say that, in fact, Lucasfilm doesn’t actually understand it all too well? “Star Wars” was the gateway from the nobody-knows-anything New Hollywood to the corporatized Hollywood of the 80s, after all.

As Lessig extolled each example of a hybrid economy (none of which, by the way and as far as I can tell, actually pay their content creators anything), what I kept wondering was not what a widespread network of such hybrids would look like, but instead at what point that corporatization would trigger a rebellion, and what form that rebellion would take. To use Lessig’s categories: my gut feeling is that, the more commerce thrives in Web 2.0, the more art will migrate to Web 3.0, whatever that might be. Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure the RIAA won’t like it.

Oh, one more thing, in re: page 95–I’ve listened to Schoenberg pieces a hundred times. Leck’ mich, Lessig!

By Marc Geelhoed

I want to get behind Lessig’s credo, and make it easier and legal for everyone everywhere to have access to all cultural artifacts and use them as they see fit, for free. If for no other reason than not everyone can afford to buy every song they want, or every book, they ought to be able to get them and digest them and be fulfilled by everything they want. I get that. But I’ve got a couple problems with Lessig’s thesis, mainly stemming from how he frames the past and present, but then getting into how to make it work in the present (that we’ll save for later).

The way I read it, Lessig’s point in Remix is that there existed in the past a “Read-Write” culture, which was followed and supplanted in the 20th century by a “Read-Only” culture. For musicians, this means that sheet music was purchased with the intention of playing and singing it in the future. (Lessig doesn’t go in to this–and footnote number 1, there are oceans of history that Lessig doesn’t go into–but there was a thriving music-publishing industry that was pretty dogged when it came to control over sheet music.) The advent of recording changed this, with the result that fewer people became proficient in playing instruments and singing such that families and friends didn’t gather round to make music, and amateur music-making died out. Or at least, it diminished greatly in importance from the time when the only way to hear music was to hear it performed live.

Today, Lessig argues, “Read-Write” is returning in the form of remixing in video and audio, and that peer-to-peer file-sharing facilitates this. Remixing is today’s version of communication, according to Lessig. In fact, we’ve been remixing all this time and we didn’t know it whenever we quote someone else’s writing. Just as we don’t need an author’s permission to make a point in our own essay (be it in high school, college, or The Atlantic), so we shouldn’t expect amateur musicians to get permission to remix existing music.

(I have to call a Time Out at this point. The point of the hypothetical original essay Lessig refers to was likely that it would serve as a springboard to further ideas and discussion. That was emphatically not the purpose of the song or sonata, or even photograph taken for a newspaper. The intended usage has to have some bearing on how the copyright law views it, right?

Time Out 2 is that the second essayist could presumably make their argument without quoting the original essayist. While the quotation undoubtedly strengthens the argument, the point could still be made. That is not the case with the remix, which by definition can’t exist without something to add to something else.)

Yet it’s this notion of “writing” that Lessig views as the paradigm for all that follows. “It is through text that we elites communicate (look at you, reading this book). For the masses, however, most information is gathered through other forms of media: TV, film, music and music video. These forms of ‘writing’ are the vernacular of today…It is no surprise, then, that these other forms of ‘creating’ are becoming an increasingly dominant form of ‘writing.’ The internet didn’t make these other forms of ‘writing’ (what I will call simply ‘media’) significant…Using the tools of digital technology…anyone can being to ‘write’ using images, or music, or video.”

Like I said, I want to be forward-thinking and get behind this. I don’t want to be the corporate suit saying this is all wrong. But I do think he’s misinterpreted cultural history and intellectual history here. Anyone agree? Before I get shouted down for my admittedly retrograde ideas, I’d just like to say that I do think there’s legitimate criticism to be made using the media in its original form. A perfect example is Thom Andersen’s 2003 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, in which Andersen spliced clips from roughly 150 movies together under his own narration to portray how the city has been portrayed by the film industry. The film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum said in an introduction to a recent screening that “Its importance comes from Andersen’s use of the medium to criticize the medium.” The documentary has never been released on DVD because of the likely headaches in acquiring approval, although it would make a great test-case of the fair-use doctrine.

I’ve been impressed by Lawrence Lessig’s public speaking and am a fan of his work on projects such as Creative Commons. Still, I didn’t want to drink the Kool-Aid on his book before I’d even cracked the cover, so I tried to start in a defensive position. Knowing full well that I am a reader easily seduced by tidy arguments and good writing, I proceeded from graph to graph with caution.

There are passages to poke at and argue over, and I’m sure we’ll get around to plenty of that this week. (For instance, has he presented those Sousa quotes fairly? Something doesn’t smell right about that to me, but that’s just gut. More research required.) Still, as a person who regularly finds herself pounding her head against her desk in frustration when it comes to sorting rights issues in an online environment, to start I’ve just got to say, “Right on!” A lot of the basic ideas Lessig lays out just make sense. Thinking about all forms of media as “writing” in the 21st century (because if you can type, you probably can/are using PhotoShop and iMovie to get your message across as well). Changing copyright rules so they are less like the tax code and more like “No right turn on red” (a.k.a. comprehensible without professional assistance). Separating the professional use of copyrighted material from the amateur use (Sure, go ahead and make a video of your 6-year-old kid dancing to the Chicago Symphony’s recording of The Nutcracker and post it to YouTube for your relatives to see). Early on, Lessig notes that if you’ve seen what good remix is, you’ll get why it says something powerful all its own–so if you need to, go see some (link courtesy Steve Smith).

That said, I think opening and closing the book with a punch of “You’re turning all our remixing/file sharing children into criminals! And I care more than ever about the children now that I’m a dad!” opens the door to too much sappy emotionalism. Even though it’s probably true, it dispersed a whiff of melodrama over the whole book for me that wasn’t needed. But you’ve got to hand it to him, couching his argument in a frame of wasted resources on other unwinnable wars (War on Drugs! War on Terror!) and proposing new views on the economy in the midst of upheaval have got to be in this season.

Some books just insist that you take the topic beyond the page, and so this week I’m super excited to inaugurate Blogger Book Club here at Mind the Gap. First off the shelf for discussion is the sure-to-stir-debate Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig.

Once upon a time I heard the name Lawrence Lessig mentioned during a panel at a publishing conference, and a room full of adults actually hissed in response. Who was this beast? As it turned out, he was a man with big (and, to some, incendiary) ideas–most of which had reducing the legal reach of copyright at their core. When I saw him on The Colbert Report a couple months back, it was clear he was still rocking boats. 

If terms like “intellectual property protection” and “copyright reform” raise your pulse rate, come take a seat on our virtual couch. If you’d like a little background before we get started, you can give the book’s contents a skim here, and there’s a quick capsule summary here.

Now, I’m no Oprah, but I am thrilled to be able to say that the following awesome people overlooked that part and agreed to join the club for this freshman outing:

• Corey Dargel is a Texas-born, Brooklyn-based composer, writer, and singer. Recent projects include the album Other People’s Love Songs and the music-theater piece Removable Parts. Corey blogs at 13neardeathexperiences.com about the creation of his new art-pop song cycle commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble.

• Marc Geelhoed manages the Grammy-winning in-house record label of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, CSO Resound. He was the first classical critic for Time Out Chicago, where he wrote from 2005 to 2008, and has contributed to Slate, the Financial Times, and the New Statesman.

• Composer and pianist Matthew Guerrieri‘s writing is always found at the blog Soho the Dog, frequently found in the Boston Globe, and occasionally spotted in NewMusicBox, Slate, and Playbill.

• Lisa Hirsch lives in Oakland, CA, where she’s a technical writer by day and a music reviewer, blogger, and chorister by night. Read more of her writing at Iron Tongue of Midnight.

• Saxophonist Brian Sacawa is the executive director of Mobtown Modern, a new music series presented by the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. He is also the co-founder of the duo Hybrid Groove Project, author of the blog Sounds Like Now, and a fierce bicycle racer.

• Composer Alex Shapiro aligns note after note with the hope that a few of them might actually sound good next to each other. Alex’s acoustic and electroacoustic works are performed and broadcast weekly across the U.S. and internationally, and can be found on almost twenty commercially released recordings. A former longtime Los Angeles denizen, she was born and raised in Manhattan and now lives on acreage closely supervised by the deer and foxes of Washington state’s San Juan Island. Alex procrastinates on her next piece by updating her website and her blog.

• Steve Smith is a man out about town Night After Night. He is also the music editor for Time Out New York, a weekly lifestyle, arts and entertainment magazine in New York City, as well as a regular contributor to The New York Times.

• Marc Weidenbaum writes daily at Disquiet.com (since 1996) about ambient/electronic music and sound art. He’s been published in Nature, NewMusicBox, Down Beat, and Pulse! (where he was an editor for seven years, and edited the comics for a decade), as well as in the manga magazine Shonen Jump (where he was an editor for five years), among other places. In April he’ll have an audio piece in an exhibit at the Crewest Gallery in Los Angeles. He lives in San Francisco’s Richmond District.

We’re only one week away from Blogger Book Club! About a month ago, I asked a few busy music thinkers if they’d be into reading Lawrence Lessig’s latest tome Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, and then publicly discussing it here with me on Mind the Gap. They graciously agreed, we’ve done our homework, and next Monday we’ll get this party started. I think I know how Oprah feels. If you haven’t read the book/aren’t familiar with Lessig’s work, check out this clip from his recent appearance at the NY Public Library (or get full video and details here). At the very least, we’ll do our best to discuss economics with a bit more levity than last Sunday’s Simpsons episode.