Saturday, April 30, 2011

Blog 9 Lessig to me

Lessig is showing the reader how copywrite is criminalizing our culture. From time immemorial humans have understood the concepts of progression. We all know that on the first day god created the earth and we are all familiar with the concept of standing on the shoulders of giants. This is the heart and soul of Lessig’s argument. We all take from those who have come before and pass it on to those who come after. It is only in the last one hundred years that this kind of thing has become illegal. Lessig provides an example of censorship in culture when he talks about an exhibit that features the music of john Lennon sang by a number o f people who are big fans of his work. Despite the fact that the artist was not in it to make money Yoko Ono objected. Yoko has created a lot of art herself so it is somewhat startling that she would fail to see the art in this. It makes me wonder how much of it is just a lack of communication. Recently Weird Al made a parody of Lady Gaga. He submitted it to Lady Gaga for approval but it was rejected. Weird Al wrote about it on his blog where word of the post reached Lady Gaga who promptly called up Weird Al and told him to go ahead and put the song out. It turns out that her manager turned down Weird Al without ever even telling Lady Gaga.
This ties nicely into the next section of this blog. Read Only culture as Lessig discusses it is the culture that has dominated the 20th century. It develops when the cost of producing media is very expensive. When it takes significant resources to produce media then there will be less media produced and distributed. This means that those with the resources will not risk their money on an artist who is different. This is the restrictive reality that is ready only culture. It is dominated by a very small number of media produces who control most if not all of the media market. Lady GaGa is a holdover of this RO culture. One of the last few vaulted to dominance by the media giants who are desperately trying to cling to control. Weird Al’s inability to contact her is a side effect of read only culture. Lucky for us Weird Al has been embracing the Read Write culture that is now rising to dominance. He writes a blog in a unprofessional style. There is not filter between his thoughts and our eyes hungrily eating up his words on the web. This is the hallmark of Read Write culture. As the price of producing media has dropped more people have been able to enter the ranks of the media producer. This causes a twofold effect. First celebrities are more approachable and media production covers a much wider swath of culture. People are seeing and liking media now that they would have never had the chance to see 20 years ago.
In this introduction to his book Lessig talks about John Sousa. Sousa was a composer at the start of the 20th century who made many famous pieces of work. He saw something sweeping the nation that he did not like. This was the predominance of the phonograph. He was disgusted by the idea that people were forgoing singing and creating music because they could listen to it whenever they wanted. He went to congress to fight for copy write as a way to stop the spread of this infernal machine. He was really concerned by what he rightfully saw as the start of read only culture where humans would become like robots because we were all shaped by the same music and culture that was fed to us by media giants. I can speak to what growing up in the 70’s was like but I don’t feel like this was a totally detrimental problem. Instead it provides the common group for read write culture to grow from. Lessig put Sousa in his book to show people that copy write was originally viewed as a way to preserver culture and reward creativity. It look like that’s what it would be at the time because the circumstances required a change. Are circumstance have changed once more and it’s time to reconsider our laws.

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