Week 3: Copyright, Creativity & The Creative Commons

Week 3: Copyright, Creativity & The Creative Commons

This week please read these items:

Lawrence Lessig, Blog: http://www.lessig.org/blog/

Lawrence Lessig, “Preface”, Introduction”, “Piracy”, “Conclusion” and “Afterward” from Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: Penguin Press, 2004, pp. xiii-xvi, 1-79, & 257-306.

Sam Howard-Spink, "Grey Tuesday, Online Cultural Activism and the Mash-up of Music and Politics." First Monday 9.10 (2004), http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_10/howard/.

And listen to these presentations:

Lawrence Lessig, ‘Free Culture Presentation’, 2002, 9Mb Flash File. http://www.lessig.org/freeculture/

and

Lawrence Lessig, et al, “Who Owns Culture?” 2004, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6122403781064290619&q=lessig&pl=...

and

Richard Stallman: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1647626314188526128&q=richard+s...

Last week Henry Jenkins and J.D. Lasica gave us some grounding in the way that cultural interaction and production have changed in recent years, especially in the context of digital media. Building upon these ideas, this week we’re turning to the work of Lawrence Lessig who has been called, among many other things, the Elvis of cyberspace law! Lessig is a passionate crusader for a legal system which reinforces and encourages creativity, rather than locking creativity down (which is what the MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America] and RIAA [Recording Industry of America Association] and their anti-piracy rhetoric platform are doing in Lessig’s view). In the excerpts from Free Culture that you’re reading, pay particular attention to the way culture has changed in terms of ownership and in terms of what that entails for creativity and cultural production. I’d encourage you to also explore the websites of the Creative Commons organisation (http://creativecommons.org/), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org/) and Lawrence Lessig’s own website. Lessig's book is a great read, so if you have time you may want to dip into some of the other chapters, too.

You’re also reading an article by Sam Howard-Spink which explores the cultural reaction to ‘The Grey Album’, and the reaction when copyright holders tried to remove the album from circulation. (see: http://www.illegal-art.org/audio/grey.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grey_Album )

When reading, keep these questions in mind:

1] How does the rhetoric of ‘piracy’ work in the debate(s) surrounding cultural production and creativity?

2] What is the history of cultural ownership and copyright?

3] How have large corporations and copyright holders reacted to new media forms and new media technologies in the past few decades?

4] What does ‘Grey Tuesday’ tell you about the way individuals react to the current copyright system?