Lessig Blog has two posts by young members of the Free Culture movement, one depressing and one heartening:
Andy Scudder writes about a student photographer he knows who wanted to be able to control whether people could print out the photos she posted on the Internet. I find this incredibly depressing. I'd taken to believing that the current wave of intellectual property extremism would eventually be overturned by sheer demographic pressure as the next generation came of age and took the reins. But if the hip-hop generation doesn't understand that art exists to be remixed by others, then who will? If, nearly a century after the collages of Picasso and Ernst, educated young artists are sympathizing with totalitarian, centralized control over the tools of creative production, then we're really losing the war.
More hopeful is Nelson Pavlosky's account of his experience growing into the Free Culture movement. Maybe the kids will be alright after all. I guess the lesson here for technologists would be that if we create systems that, like peer-to-peer networks or blogging software, permit creative people to observe the benefits of decentralization and freedom, then they can be awakened.
Two things are at work here. 1)Sharing/Creative Commons is dependent on the generation you belong to. The over 40 don't care for it. The under 30 (for the most part) see the value of sharing/derivative works.
ReplyDelete2)what genre you are working in definitely affects your perspective. Musicians and writers have less interest in controlling sharing and reproduction. Painters and those dealing with physical objects are more likely to have a vested interest in controlling reproduction.