Free Culture

This week's my powerpoint week, so I'll use my blog to plan what I'm going to say. Spoiler alert; if you don't wanna be bored out of your mind for today's lecture, you're probably better off not reading it. I got some pretty interesting things to tie this reading with the 'bloggable' "Who Killed The Electric Car?" movie I saw a couple weeks back, so I'll type that up soon.



[SHOW TITLE PAGE]

Alright, so: this week's reading is the “Piracy” section of Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture.

[CLICK TO NEXT SLIDE]

Lessig is a law professor at Stanford best known as a proponent of fewer restrictions on copyright. That's him and his book right there.

[SWITCH TO FIREFOX]

I wanna get us started, though, with a short clip from the 20s. You guys probably have seen this scene portrayed in other movies before; props if you can name the movie without cheating.

[GO BACK TO PRESENTATION]
[GO TO NEXT SLIDE]

So yeah, as you could tell by the title on there, that movie is Steamboat Bill, Jr. Back in the 1920s, culture was completely free. This means that back in the day, people used the works of others as inspiration and no one gave it a second thought; nobody needed to ask for permission. This gave plenty of room for Disney to create new things out of things that are barely old.

[CLICK TO NEXT ELEMENT]

The character we now recognize as Mickey Mouse made his first successful debut in Steamboat Willie. This cartoon was a direct parody of the silent comedy Steamboat Bill, Jr.

[CLICK TO NEXT ELEMENT]

That movie got its inspiration from a song called Steamboat Bill. No one had a problem with “Disney creativity”; he took what he saw, made it your own and released it back into the world. You might be surprised as to how many Disney movies were inspired by the works of others:

[CLICK TO NEXT SLIDE]

Considering how much wealth Disney makes borrowing from others, you'd think that they wouldn't mind if others borrowed a little back. As you could probably guess, if I were to suddenly make something “inspired” by something Disney has created, I'd most likely be sued out of existence and be accused of plagiarizing or “piracy” because even something as old as Steamboat Willie which was made in frickin' 1928 won't be in the public domain until 2023—that is, if they don't lobby congress to extend it again. Ironically, the movie Steamboat Willie was based on is on public domain and, as you just saw, can be legally found on Google Video for free.

[GO TO NEXT SLIDE]

So, what's going on?

[CLICK TO NEXT ELEMENT]

Lessig argues that we're moving from a free culture to a permission culture. Back in Disney's day, people were free to learn from the work of others, put a unique creative twist on it and release it back to the world—as Lessig calls it, “Rip, mix and burn”. Nowadays, we need to get everyone's permission for anything that remotely resembles something else's work to be absolutely sure we won't get sued.

Some have justified this change from a free culture to a permission culture as necessary because it protects commercial creativity.

[CLICK TO NEXT ELEMENT]

However, “this is not a protectionism to protect artists. It is instead a protectionism to protect certain forms of business.” Corporations loves them some money, and will go to any length to eliminate emerging competition, especially if that competition seems to be substantially better and threatens the success of the current market leaders.

If I made a cheap Mickey Mouse knockoff that nobody liked, I'd either be laughed at, flamed or ignored altogether—but what if I redesigned the character and made him much cooler, much more appealing than Disney's Mickey Mouse? Well, that's when Disney would bother to come after me, because now I'm a legitimate threat.

[CLICK TO NEXT SLIDE]

Here's another example: In 1933 Edwin Howard Armstrong received his patent for the FM radio, a technology he later on demonstrated to be vastly superior to the technology of the time, AM radio. Armstrong was working for RCA, which back then was the dominant player in the AM radio market. His new technology threatened RCA's empire, so they did everything they could to prevent it from becoming popular, including manipulating the FCC. Eventually RCA began to use FM technology in their televisions, and refused to pay Armstrong any royalties despite the patents. As soon as the patents expired, RCA offered a settlement so low it wouldn't even cover Armstrong's lawyer fees from the years of legal battles he had trying to defend his patents from RCA. The defeat led to his suicide in 1954.

[CLICK TO NEXT ELEMENT]

Because of the corruption in our political process, RCA was able to stifle the effect of technological change. They did their best to kill a superior technology while it was still young in order to preserve their bottom line.

[CLICK TO NEXT SLIDE]

The Internet is thus to the industries that built and distributed content in the twentieth century what FM radio was to AM radio ... : the beginning of the end, or at least a substantial transformation.

And that...

[CLICK TO NEXT ELEMENT]

...brings us to p2p sharing.

[CLICK TO NEXT SLIDE]

There are four types of sharers:

[CLICK AND READ THE REST OF THE SHOW WITH MINOR ELABORATIONS]