aktuelle Ausgabe

Aesthetic, yes. Journalistic, too.

molePRINT - aktuelle Ausgabe

Geschrieben von: Print Redaktion

by Alfredo Cramerotti, February 2009.

An exclusive excerpt of the text from the upcoming book “Private Investigations” published by Büchs’n’Books and edited by Andrei Siclodi.

Reality and fiction

An emergent way of researching, producing, and distributing “knowledge” about people, histories, and situations today no longer passes through broadcast or media journalism but reaches a (specialized) worldwide audience through the public of the “globalized” circuits of art exhibitions, biennials, film festivals, cultural celebrations, and so forth. However small this public may be – and it is not – this reception and redistribution of information affects our idea of the way we learn about things of the world and about ourselves. This “interaction” between art and journalism is something more than a trend. It developed to the point of forming a new mode of journalism, “aesthetic journalism,” varying in intensity according to the degree of the journalistic method applied by the artist. Aesthetic journalism is a mode of investigation into social, political, geographical, economic, or cultural issues that works through the circuits of art.

Just for a moment imagine journalism and art as a multilayered single activity rather than clear-cut separate fields. Journalism provides a view on things, art a view on the view (feeding back on the first). Even if the one is a coded system that speaks for the truth (or so it claims), and the other a set of activities that questions itself at every step (or so it claims), both are methods of representation and mediation of our human condition. When a journalist undertakes an investigation, s/he selects a number of images and words out of a continuum of life (a subtraction from a huge and complex number of relations and processes – what we call reality). When an artist creates a work of art, s/he creates a narrative where there was none (an addition to reality). The flux between adding and subtracting creates the environment in which we live. In terms of representation, very little changes, whether a story is “factual” or “fictional” – an account and a depiction are produced. What changes dramatically, however, is how this story is told and distributed and what the consequences are that will affect our behavior.

Questioning and delivering

The profession of journalist involves an almost ethical stance: to serve the highest number of people possible and to be a witness of history, not its maker. In this process, the journalist may or may not denounce her or his biased view and the fallibility of pursuing truth. Since the Age of Enlightenment – when to address public interest was of primary concern for the bourgeoisie – the profession of the journalist has become an object of negotiation. It is now a constant reconciliation between the sources of information, the employer’s interests, the power exerted on the subject of the reporting and on the audience, but also the expectations of the very public it serves. This negotiation between multiple terms is the reason why journalism today is conducted in the pressroom and not in the field. When something (we are told) happens somewhere, we get instant access to broadcasted footage in real time, mediated by experts that comment on the live feeding of the images and by digital editors that mix, overlap, crop, and insert graphics and running texts. What we get in omniscience, we lost in context and sense. We no longer know the situation in which something takes place, since the context is very much constructed, mediated, and delivered to the viewer for consumption. More news, at any time; more journalism, universally coded; more events, thanks to the multiplication of newsworthiness. We have reached the point where we need to have “metamedia,” the explanatory industry. We consider everything either reliable or manipulated, rely for judgement on media watchers and critics, commentary programmes, articles on the interpretation of other articles, and so on. In this context, to explain also means to influence.

If journalism has constantly struggled between its “mission” and its power position, art, on the other hand, is no less implicated in a dualism: artists are keen to appeal to a particular audience (the art audience of the globalized circuits as described earlier), pursuing at the same time something beyond the artistic field as if it were “more real than reality.” Often non-fiction work by artists is uncritically taken for reliable information, as a valid counter-account to media journalism. However, since an act of interpretation is never neutral, art and journalism find themselves on the same level regarding the narratives they propose; this brings us back to my earlier invitation to imagine a concept of information which includes the artistic treatment of reality.

Aesthetic journalism

Here lies the value of a journalism “being” aesthetic rather than a journalism using aesthetic means (which it does very well and has always done). Journalism is necessary to help us deal with a growing complex civilization, separations of roles, and procedures in administration, science, culture, and technology; it has become the modus operandi for dealing with that which cannot be experienced first-hand. Since the journalistic attitude is so successful in proposing the model as the event, it has spread to many other areas outside the journalistic field, constructing the boundaries of normalcy for both representation and reality. In this sense, the journalist is an artisan, someone who carefully designs information (declaring, or not, its distortion) in order to present an understandable picture of the world “out there.”

Art and journalism are therefore two sides of a unique activity, which generates a main question: is it possible to work with aesthetics, allowing meaning based on the viewer’s interpretation, and still be informative, precise, and relevant? If truth telling shifts from news to art, how can we negotiate the confinement of art within the boundaries of institutions, biennials, and a few public projects? Aesthetic journalism works on the borders of reality and fiction, using documentary techniques and journalistic methods but self-reflecting on those means; ultimately, it is not about delivering information but questioning it, reversing the tradition of both fields (art and journalism). An activity – produced by either artists or journalists – that queries the realm of fiction as a site for the imagination and that of journalism as a site for reality. Here, we get closer to the core of reality itself when we make our reality not a given, irreversible fact but a possibility among many others.

The problem arises when an artist feels obliged to strip down his or her investigative work to bare facts. It is more important, in my view, to vary one’s vocabulary according to different contexts than to continue to propose the dichotomy fact-fiction. There are no longer two distinct ways of dealing with the world around us, one objective and the other fictionalized, but more types of the singular activity of production and distribution of information. The hybridization of journalism with art adapts imagination, narrative, and abstraction to implement the research and delivery of information; it does not attempt to be objective at all costs, nor discard creativity in favour of neutrality.

Instruction and intuition

Aesthetics is about what our senses experience; artistic investigation becomes a tool to question both the selection of the material delivered to us and the specific reasons for why things are selected. Cultural production in general and art in particular are increasingly at the forefront for understanding the world we live in. If, in the 1950s or 1960s, the economic mechanisms were the main referents for our experience as members of a given society (either in terms of conformity or antagonism), it is now no longer the case. Cultural dynamics play an increasingly important role, and the criteria of economic achievement are no longer sufficient for a proper comprehension of phenomena like, to name one of the most abused terms, the “clash of civilizations.” It seems we have to rethink society bottom-up and re-address many of our referents in cultural, even aesthetic terms. Not surprisingly, multinationals and corporations made huge efforts to re-invest their profits in cultural and artistic projects in order to create a ”culture” that can travel beyond national schemes and monetary values.

The past few generations of artists feel they cannot leave research and a commitment to social and political meaning out of their practice and so engage with production and distribution outside the specific constraints of art. This trait could shape the future view of the world through a re-adaptation in artistic terms of journalism and the news industry. But rather than abandon the aesthetic approach in search of a journalistic neutrality, the real challenge is to “contaminate” one with the other, making it impossible to distinguish the two approaches, thus “alerting” the viewer to the mechanisms at play in representation and reporting. In fact, to think about something in a “secure” way by means of structured information (like professional journalism) is to reduce the unknown to the expected and therefore take away the possibility to learn. In addition, to be able to learn something, we first have to unlearn what we take for granted.

Alfredo Cramerotti is curator at QUAD centre for art and media (Derby, UK), co-curator of the next Manifesta 8 European biennial of contemporary art (Murcia and Cartagena, Spain 2010) and of the collective projects AGM-Annual General Meeting and CPS-Chamber of Public Secrets. He is editor of the Critical Photography book series at Intellect Books (Bristol, UK & Chicago, USA) and recent publications include the book Aesthetic Journalism: How to inform without informing (2009). He was Fellow Theory and Art Criticism at the Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen in 2007-8. Web: www.alcramer.net <http://www.alcramer.net>

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Beitrag veröffentlichen auf:

Erste Printausgabe

molePRINT - aktuelle Ausgabe

Geschrieben von: Printredaktion

Mole ist eine mexikanische Gewürzmischung, die sich aus bis zu 75 Gewürzen zusammensetzt, mit einer geschmacklichen Bandbreite von scharf bis süß. An Molen legen aber auch Schiffe an und ab. Was aber ist MOLE? MOLE ist ein wirkliches, freies Kulturmedium für Tirol. Kulturelle Kost aus lokaler Produktion ohne große Transportwege. Bio? Logisch! Dass MOLE nun in ihrer ersten Ausgabe vorliegt, verdankt sie der Initiative und Zusammenarbeit verschiedenster Personen und Institutionen: Freies Radio Innsbruck FREIRAD 105,9 MHz, Galerie St. Barbara/Osterfestival Tirol, Klangspuren Schwaz, p.m.k/Plattform mobile Kulturinitiativen und TKI – Tiroler Kulturinitiativen/IG Kultur Tirol, die MOLE als Kooperationsprojekt bei den stadt_potenzialen 08 einreichten; der Fachjury, die das Potenzial eines solchen Mediums erkannte; den vielen Menschen, die ihre Begeisterung in dieses Projekt investierten.

Was will MOLE? MOLE will die öffentliche Wahrnehmung von Kunst Und Kultur erhöhen und einen differenzierten inhaltlichen Diskurs zu diesen Themen forcieren. MOLE will die prekäre Mediensituation in Tirol für zeitgenössische Kunst- und Kulturarbeit beseitigen. MOLE will die Felder die Felder beackern, die die eingesessenen Medien brachliegen lassen.

Jede Ausgabe von MOLEprint wird einen Schwerpunkt tragen, der Schwerpunkt Medien für die erste Ausgabe ist aufgelegt. Wer hier eine Abrechnung mit der Tiroler Medienlandschaft erwartet, wird enttäuscht werden, in dieser Ausgabe geht es vielmehr darum, Probleme und Alternativen aufzuzeigen: dass Qualitätsjournalismus seinen Preis hat, sich die Medienlandschaften in Österreich und der Schweiz sowohl
unterscheiden als auch ähneln, dass Kunst mit journalistischen Mitteln arbeitet, Radio auch aus einem Dorf kommen kann, Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund erschwerten Zugang zu Medien haben, dass man ein Medium auch selbst basteln kann. Neben dem Schwerpunkt wird es in jeder MOLEprint- Ausgabe auch Platz für aktuelle Entwicklungen geben. MOLE stellt Tendenzen im Bereich Neuer Medien vor oder entwickelt sie mit Moleedo gleich selbst, sie begleitet Kunstwerke bei ihrer Entstehung und bietet Raum für Arbeiten bildender KünstlerInnen, FotografInnen, LiteratInnen.

MOLEprint ist überaus eng vernetzt mit MOLEonline auf www.molekultur.at, um erstens schnell auf Ereignisse reagieren zu können und zweitens die Kulturschaffenden Tirols mit einzubeziehen. Hier gibt es Partizipation, Austausch, Diskussion. Das Herzstück von www.molekultur.at ist der Kulturkalender für Tirol, die erste Anlaufstelle für Kulturinteressierte in Tirol.
Was kann MOLE? Qualität liefern, Neues bringen, Diskussionen auslösen – und das hoffentlich vier Mal im Jahr. In diesem Sinne: Gute Unterhaltung mit der ersten Ausgabe von MOLE. Zeitschrift für kulturelle Nahversorgung!

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Remix

molePRINT - aktuelle Ausgabe

Geschrieben von: Redaktion

Lawrence Lessig

A talk given at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, December 16, 2008

Transcribed and edited by Michael Mandiberg, June 2009

I've written five books. Four of these books are extraordinarily depressing. I like depressing, deep, dark stories about the inevitable destruction of great, fantastic ideas. After my first child was born, my thinking began to shift some and I wrote REMIX, which is quite new in the collection because it's a fundamentally happy book, or at least, mostly a happy book. It's optimistic. It's about how certain fantastic ideas will win in this cultural debate. Though the problem is that I'm not actually used to this optimism; I'm not used to living in a world without hopelessness. So I'm actually moving on from this field to focus on a completely hopeless topic, solving problems of corruption, actually. Completely hopeless. But I am happy to come here to the Computer History Museum, a place that is extraordinarily important to my own imagination. I am happy to come here to talk about this most recent book.

I want to talk about it by telling you some stories, making an observation, and constructing an argument about what we need to do to protect the opportunity that technology holds for this society. There are three stories, the first one very short A very long time ago, the elite spoke Latin, and, the vulgar, the rest of the people, spoke other languages: English, French, and German. The elite ignored the masses. The masses ignored the elite. That's the first story, very short, as I promised.

Here’s number two: In 1906, John Philip Sousa, traveled to the United States Congress to talk about phonographs, a technology he called the “talking machines.” John Philip Sousa was not a fan of the talking machines. He was quoted as saying “These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy, in front of every house on summer evenings, you would find young people gathered together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cords will be eliminated by a process of evolution as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.”²

I want you to focus on this picture of “young people gathered together singing the songs of the day or even old songs.” This is culture. You could call it a kind of read/write culture. It's a culture where people participate in the creation and recreation of their culture. It is read/write, and Sousa’s fear was that we would lose the capacity to engage in this read/write creativity because of these “infernal machines.” They would take it away, displace it, and in its place, we'd have the opposite of read/write creativity: a kind of read-only culture. A culture where creativity is consumed, but the consumer is not a creator. A culture that is top-down: a culture where the “vocal cords” of the millions of ordinary people have been lost.

Here is story three: In 1919, the United States voted itself dry as it launched an extraordinary war against an obvious evil. A war against dependence on alcohol; a war inspired by the feminist movement; a war inspired by ideas of progressive reform; a war that was inspired by the thought that government could make us a better society. Ten years into that war, it was pretty clear this war was failing. In places around the country, the question was how we could redouble our efforts to win the war. In Seattle, the police started to find ways to fight back against these criminals using new technology: the wiretap. Roy Olmstead and 11 others found themselves the target of a federal investigation into the illegal production and distribution of alcohol. His case, Olmstead vs. The United States (1928), was heard by the Supreme Court and the question the Supreme Court had to answer was whether the wiretap was legal. When the police tapped the phones of Olmsted and his colleagues, they didn't get a judge's permission, or a warrant. They just tapped the phones. The Supreme Court looked at the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” Chief Justice Taft concluded that the wiretap was not prescribed by this task. He said the Fourth amendment was designed to protect against trespassing. But wiretapping doesn't involve any necessary trespass, they didn't enter Olmstead's home to attach the wires, they attached it to the wires after it left Olmsted's home. There was no trespass, therefore no violation of the Fourth Amendment.

In voicing his dissent Louis Brandeis argued vigorously for a different principal. Brandeis said the objective of the Fourth Amendment was to protect against a certain form of invasion, to protect the privacy of people. He argued that how you protect privacy is a function of technology, and we need to translate the old protections from one era into a new context. Now, Brandeis lost in that case and the wiretap won, but the war that the wiretap was aiding was quickly recognized to be a failure. In 1933, when this failure was recognized, it was recognized because people noticed increasing costs they hadn't even anticipated when they first enacted this prohibition: the rise in organized crime and the fall in civil rights. They were also seeing a vanishing benefit from this war: everybody still drank. They realized maybe the costs of this war were greater than the benefits. And so, in 1933 the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th Amendment, and Prohibition ended. Importantly, what was repealed was not the aim of fighting the dependence on alcohol, but the idea of using war to fight this dependence.

Those are the stories, and here's the observation. In a sense that should be obvious, writing is an extraordinarily democratic activity. I don't mean that we vote to decide to what people can write, I mean that everyone should have the capacity to write. Why do we teach everyone to write and measure education by the capacity people have to write? More specifically, between ninth grade and college, why do we waste time on essays on Shakespeare or Hemingway, or Proust? Why? What do we expect to gain? Because, as an academic, I can tell you the vast majority of this writing is just crap. So, why do we we force kids to suffer, and, why do we force their professors to suffer this creativity?

The obvious answer is that we learn something. In the process of learning how to write, we at least learn respect for just how hard this kind of creativity is, and that respect is itself its own value. In this democratic practice of writing, which we teach everyone, we include quoting. I had a friend in college who wrote essays that were all exactly like this: strings of quotes from other peoples' writings that were pulled together in a way that was so convincing that he never got anything less than an A+ in all of his university writing classes. Now, he would take and use and build upon other peoples' words without permission of the other authors: so long as you cite. In my view, plagiarism is the only crime for which the death penalty is appropriate. So long as you cite, you can take whatever you want and use it for your purpose in creating. Imagine if the rule were different; imagine you went around and asked for permission to quote. Imagine how absurd it would be to write the Hemingway estate and ask for permission to include three lines in an essay about Hemingway for your English class. When you recognize how absurd it is, you've recognized how this is an essentially democratic form of expression, the freedom to take and use freely is built into our assumptions about how we create what we write.

Here's the argument. I want to think about writing, or more broadly creating, in a digital age. What should the freedom to write, the freedom to quote, the freedom to remix be? Notice the parallels that exist between this question and the stories that I've told. As with the war of prohibition, we, in the United States, are in the middle of a war. Actually, of course, we're in the middle of many wars, but the one I want to talk about is the copyright wars, those which my friend the late Jack Valenti used to refer to as his own “terrorist war.” Apparently the terrorists in this war are our children. And, as with the war Sousa launched, this war is inspired by artists and an industry terrified that changes in technology will affect a radical change in how culture gets made. As with the 21st Amendment, these wars are raising an important new question: Are the costs of this war greater than its benefits? Or, alternatively, can we obtain the benefits without suffering much of the costs?

Now, to answer that question, we need to think first about the benefits of copyright. Copyright is, in my view, an essential solution to a particular unavoidable economic problem. It may seem like a paradox, but we would get less speech without copyright. Limiting the freedom of some people to copy creates incentives to create more speech. That's a perfect and happy story; it should function in exactly this way. But, as with privacy, the proper regulation has to reflect changes in technology; aas the technology changes, the architecture of the proper regulation is going to change. And what made sense in one period might make no sense in another. We need to adjust, to achieve the same value in a different context. So with copyright, what would the right regulation be?

The first point of regulation would be to distinguish, as Sousa did, between the amateur and the professional. Copyright needs to encourage both. We need to have the incentives for the professional and the freedom for the amateur. We can see something about how to do this by watching the evolution of digital technologies in the Internet era. The first stage begins around 2000, which is a period of extraordinary innovation to extend read-only culture. Massively efficient technology enables people to consume culture created elsewhere. Apple's iTunes Music Store allows you to download it for 99 cents, though only to an iPod and, of course, only to your iPod (and a few other iPods whose owners you trust with your iTunes login). This is an extraordinarily important and valuable part of culture. It's what my colleague, Paul Goldstein, used to refer to as the celestial jukebox, critically important as it gives people access to extraordinary diversity for the first time in human history. That is one stage.

A second stage begins around 2004, a reviving of Sousa's read/write culture. The poster child for this culture is probably something like Wikipedia, but the version I want to focus on is something I call remix. Think about remix in the context of music. Everybody knows the Beatles White Album. It inspired Jay Z’s Black Album, which inspired DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, which, literally synthesizes the tracks so that the White Album and Black Album together produce something grey. That's 2004, two albums synthesized together in what came to be known as a mashup. The equivalent today is something like the work of Girl Talk who synthesizes up to 280 different songs together into one particular song. Think in the same context about film. In 2004, with a budget of $218, Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation makes its debut in wowing Cannes and wining the 2004 Los Angeles International Film Festival. Caouette took 20 years of super-8, and VHS home movies and an iMac given to him by a friend to create an incredibly moving documentary about his life and relationship with his mentally ill mother. On a more modest, but more prevalent level, YouTube is full of something called Anime Music Videos. These videos are Anime, the Japanese cartoons sweeping America today. It is not just kids making them, but we'll just pretend for a second, kids take the original video and they re-edit it, setting it to a different sound track. It can be banal or interesting, and almost all of this read/write has emerged on YouTube.

Many people focus on the copyrighted TV shows that are digitized and posted onto YouTube overnight. I want you to think about the call and response pattern that YouTube inspires, where someone will create something and then someone will create another version of the same thing. A hip-hop artist named Soulja Boy created a song called “Crank Dat” which featured a dance called “The Superman.” The beat was catchy, the lyrics were literally a set of instructions on how to reproduce the dance. The original music video was a low-budget demonstration of the steps required to reproduce the dance.⁸ And reproduce it did.⁹ That how-to video has been viewed over 40 million times as of June 2009.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of videos of the Soulja Boy Superman dance.¹⁰ Each one building on the next: black kids, white kids, Jewish kids, cartoon characters, Internet celebrities, politicians.¹¹ The point is these are increasingly conversations between young people from around the world. YouTube becomes a platform as a way to talk to each other. It's the modern equivalent of what Sousa spoke of when he spoke of “the young people together, singing the songs of the day or the old songs.” But rather than gathering on the front lawn, they now do it with digital technologies, sharing creativity with others around the world. Or, finally, in the context of politics, just today I discovered a remix of the presidential debates that emphasizes the prevalence of talking points through remix.¹² Many people saw the “Yes We Can” video featuring famous musicians singing along to one of Barack Obama’s speeches.¹³ This kind of pastiche has become a natural way to express politics, mixing songs, sounds, and words that maybe a decade ago wouldn't be understandable.¹⁴ My favorite is Johan Soderberg’s “Bush Blair Endless Love” which edits their speeches to a love song by Diana Ross and Lionel Ritchie.¹⁵ I'm very sad, but this is one of the last times I get to share this one, as Bush’s term is ending shortly.

Remix has nothing to do with technique, because the techniques this work employs have been available to filmmakers and videographers from the beginning of those forms of expression. What's important here is that the technique has been democratized, for anyone who has access to a fifteen hundred dollar computer.¹⁶ Anyone can take images, sounds, video from the culture around us and remix them in ways that speak to a generation more powerfully than raw text ever could. And that's the key. This is just writing for the 21st century. And we who spend our lives writing have to recognize the text, the non-multimedia, plain alpha-numeric text in the 21st Century is the Latin from the Middle Ages. The words, images, sounds and videos of the 21st Century speak to the vulgar; they are the forms of expression that are understood by most people. The problem is that the laws governing quoting in these new forms of expression are radically different from the norms that govern quoting from text. In this new form of expression that sweeps through online communities using digital technology, permission is expected first. Now, why is there this difference?

It is a simple, technical clause in the law, a conflict between two architectures of control. One architecture, copyright, is triggered every time a copy is made. The other architecture, digital technology, produces a copy in every single use of culture. This is radical change in the way copyright law regulated culture.

Think for example for example, about a book that is regulated in physical space by copyright law. An important set of uses of a book constitute free uses of a book, because to read a book is not to produce a copy. To give someone a book is not a fair use of a book, it's a free use of a book, because to give someone a book is not to produce a copy of a book. To sell a book requires no permission from the copyright owner because to sell a book is not to produce a copy. To sleep on a book is an unregulated act in every jurisdiction around the world because sleeping on a book does not produce a copy. These unregulated uses are balanced with a set of regulated uses that create the incentives necessary to produce great new works. So if you want to publish a book, you need permission from the copyright owner. In the American tradition, there is a thin sliver of exceptions called “fair uses,” uses that would otherwise have been regulated by the law but which the law says ought to remain free to create the incentive for people to build upon or critique earlier work.

Enter the Internet, where every single use produces a copy. We go from this balance between unregulated, regulated and fair uses to a presumptive rule of regulated uses merely because the platform through which we get access to our culture has changed, and that renders this read/write activity presumptively illegal. DJ Danger Mouse knew he could never get permission from the Beatles to remix their work. Caouette discovered he could wow Cannes for $218, then discovered it would cost over $400,000 to clear the rights to the music in the background of the video that he had shot. Anime Music Videos are increasingly getting takedowns and notices from lawyers who are not happy about the 1,000 of hours of remixed video needed to create the Anime Music Videos. And back to my favorite example of “Bush Blair Endless Love”: I don't care what you think about Tony Blair, I don't care what you think about George Bush, and I don't care what you think about the war. The one thing that you cannot say about this video is what the lawyers said when they were asked for permission to synchronize those images with that soundtrack. The lawyers said no, you can't have our permission because “it's not funny.” So, the point here is to recognize that no one in Congress ever thought about this. There was no ATM-RECA Act, the “Act To Massively Regulate Every Creative Act” Act. This is the unintended consequence of the interaction between two architectures of regulation, and, in my view, this is problem number one: The law is fundamentally out of sync with the technology. And, just as with the Fourth Amendment, this needs to be updated. Copyright law needs an update.

Problem number two is what those who live in Southern California typically think of as problem number one: Piracy, or more specifically peer-to-peer piracy. Piracy is terrorism that Jack Valenti spoke of where when he called kids terrorists. Now, I think this is a problem; I don't support people using technology to violate other people's rights. In my book, Free Culture, and in REMIX, I repeatedly say you should not use peer-to-peer networks to copy without the permission of the copyright owner. But all of that acknowledged, we need to recognize that this war of prohibition has not worked; it has not changed the bad behavior. Here's a chart of peer-to-peer simultaneous users. The one thing we learned from this chart is that peer-to-peer users don't seem to read the Supreme Court’s briefs: The arrow marks the date that the Supreme Court declared completely, unambiguously, that this is presumptively illegal.

All this war has done is produce a generation of “criminals.” That part of the story is very ugly, unhappy, and sad. It is the sort of inspiration that I used for my last book Free Culture. But times have changed, and the story in REMIX is a story of change. A change that is inspired by what I think of as the third stage in this development: the development of hybrid economies.

To understand a hybrid economy, first think about what economies mean. By economies I mean repeated practices of exchange, over time between at least two parties. I want to identify three such economies. First, there are commercial economies. At the grocery store it is a quid pro quo. This many bananas for that many dollars. Money is how we speak in this economy. Second, there are economies where money is not part of the exchange. For example, two kids playing on the playground is a sharing economy. Friends going out to lunch sharing their time with each other is a sharing economy. And romantic love is a sharing economy. They are economies, because they exist over time, but, for these economies, money is not how we speak. Indeed, if we introduced money into these economies, we would radically change them, right? So imagine two friends were planning a lunch date, and one says, “How about next week?” And the other one says, “Naah, how about $50 instead?” Or what happens when money is introduced into romantic relationships? We would radically change the meaning of that economy for both parties involved.

The point is to recognize that these are rich and important economies, and they coexist with the commercial economy. They don't necessarily compete, but we want lives where we have both. Now the Internet, of course, has produced both such economies, both commercial and sharing economies, sharing economies like Wikipedia, or free sound resources like FreeSound.org or SETI@home where people make their resources available to discover information about the universe. The Internet also has commercial economies, economies where people leverage knowledge to produce value.

A hybrid economy is the third economy I want to discuss. A hybrid commercial entity that leverages a sharing economy, or it is a sharing entity that leverages a commercial economy. I'm not going to talk about the second case. I want to focus on the first case where commercial economies leverage sharing economies. So here are some examples, obvious examples.

Flickr, from its very birth, was a photo-sharing site that built sharing into its DNA. Indeed, it facilitated sharing by setting “public” as the default viewing state for all uploaded images, and giving people the option to license their photos explicitly under a Creative Commons license. This sharing enabled community creation. When Yahoo bought Flickr, their goal was to try to leverage value out of this sharing economy. Likewise, Yelp has exploded, as thousands of people around the world share reviews of hotels or restaurants. These shared reviews, which people do for free, produce value for Yelp. Second Life began as a virtual world filled with big blue oceans and beautiful green fields, but through literally hundreds and thousands of hours of volunteer labor, by people from around the world creating objects, places and buildings, they have produced an extraordinarily rich environment that attracts people to Second Life, and which profits the company, Linden Labs.¹⁷

These are examples of what I think of as a hybrid. Once you see these examples, you will begin to see hybrids everywhere. So, is Amazon really a commercial economy in this sense? Because, of course, though it's selling books, much of the value of Amazon comes from the enormous amount of activity that people devote towards helping other people navigate the products which Amazon tries to sell. Apple is doing this, even Microsoft gets this deep down in their DNA. Of course, Microsoft builds much of its support through volunteers who spend an enormous amount of their time not helping their local church, but helping other people run Microsoft products more simply. Now this is not an accident. Mark Smith, a very bright former academic works in something called the Community Technologies Group at Microsoft. This group develops all sorts of technologies to gauge the health of these communities, to encourage these communities to be more healthy so that other people want to spend more time for free helping Microsoft get more rich. This dynamic is extraordinary. And it's no surprise, then, that at a conference about a year and one-half ago, I heard Steve Ballmer declare every single successful Internet business will be a hybrid business. I think there is enormous promise in this development of free culture that is being supported on top of free markets. This presents an enormous potential for the Internet economy to drive value back into these creative industries. That is the argument for what I think can happen, but this takes us doing something to produce it.

I want to identify two kinds of changes. The first change is a very technical legal change: the law needs to give up the obsession with the copy. As discussed earlier, copyright law is triggered on the production of every copy. To use a technical and legal term, that is insane. The law needs to focus, in my view, on a meaningful activity; in a digital world, the copy is not a meaningful activity. Meaningful activity, instead, is a function of the context of the copy’s use. We need to distinguish between copies and remixes. We need to distinguish between taking someone's work and just duplicating it versus doing something with their work that creates something new. And we need to distinguish between the professional and amateur. The copyright law, as it exists right now, presumptively regulates all this in the same way. Never before in the history of copyright law has it regulated so broadly. In my view, it makes no sense to regulate this broadly right now. Instead, copyright law needs to focus on professional work being copied without being remixed. It needs to effectively guarantee professionals can control copies of their works that are made commercially available. But amateurs making remixes need to have free use, not fair use, and exempted from the law of copyright. So, amateurs get to remix work without worrying about whether a lawyer would approve their remix or not. And between these two very easy cases, there are two very hard cases, (professional remixes, and amateur copying), cases where the law of fair use needs to continue to negotiate to make sure that sufficient incentives are created while leaving important creativity free. Now, if you look at this and you have any conservative, quiet instincts inside you, you might recognize this as a kind of conservative argument. I am arguing in the favor of deregulating a significant space of culture, and focusing regulation where the regulators can convince us that it will be doing some good. That's change number one.

Change number two is about peer-to-peer piracy. As discussed earlier, we have to recognize we're a decade into a war on piracy that has totally failed. The response of some to totally failed wars is to continue wage war against the enemy. That was Jack Valenti's instinct. My instinct is the opposite. It's to stop suing kids and to start suing for peace. For the last decade, the very best scholars around the country have created an enormous number of proposals for ways to facilitate compensation to artists without breaking the Internet, proposals like compulsory licenses, or the voluntary collective license.¹⁸ But as you look at all of these proposals, what we should recognize is what the world would've been like if we had had these proposals a decade ago. Number one, artists would have more money; of course artists get nothing from peer-to-peer file sharing, they don't get anything when lawyers sue to stop peer-to-peer file sharing (because anything money collected goes to the lawyers, not the artists.) Number two, we would have more competition in businesses; the rules would be clearer, so there would be more businesses who could get venture capital to support them as they innovate around ways to make content more easily accessible. Number three, the point that is most important to me, is that we would not have a generation of criminals surrounding us. And we need to consider these proposals now. We need this legal change.

The law needs to change, but so do we. We need to find ways to chill control-obsessed individuals and corporations who believe the single objective of copyright law is to control use rather than thinking about the objective of copyright law to create incentives for creation. And we need to practice respect for this new generation of creators. For example, there is a kind of hybrid which I unfairly refer to as a Darth Vader hybrid. This name was was inspired by the Star Wars MashUps site (http://www.starwars.com). This site enables users to remix this 30-year old franchise through access to video footage from the films, into which you can upload and insert your own material. You can integrate your own music and pictures into the Star Wars series. But if you read the terms of service for this site, the mashups are all owned by Lucas Film.¹⁹ Indeed, the Lucas Film has a worldwide perpetual license to exploit all content you upload for free without any recognition back to the original creator. Yes this is a hybrid economy, but an economy where the creator doesn't have any rights. Instead, it's a sharecropping economy in the digital age. This is an important understanding to track because people are increasingly taking notice of the way hybrid economies work and wondering whether there's justice in it. Om Malik asks, does “this culture of participation... build businesses on our collective backs?. . .Whatever “the collective efforts” are, they are going to boost the economic value of those entities. Will they share in their upside? Not likely!”²⁰

We increasingly arrive at this question: What is a just hybrid? I don't think we know the answer to that question completely. I do think we have some clues. Neither historical nor digital sharecropping is a just hybrid. So how, then, can we express this respect? Well, one way to express this respect is to practice it, for companies to practice it, and you can practice it by doing as Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Girl Talk, Beastie Boys, David Byrne, Spoon, Fort Minor, Danger Mouse, Gilberto Gil, Thievery Corporation, Matmos, Cee-Lo, Le Tigre, and My Morning Jacket have done, making your works available in ways that expressly permit people to share and build upon your works. Many companies are already doing this, companies like Flickr, Blip TV, Picasa, Fotonaut, Yahoo, and, I promise, before the end of next year, Wikipedia.²¹All of these entities build encouragement on top of Creative Commons licenses. Licenses which we launched in 2003, and which over the last six years have exploded in numbers so that there are probably more than 150 million digital objects out there that are licensed under Creative Commons licenses. This is a way to say to creators, we respect the creativity you have produced, we give you a freedom to express that respect to others, and it's an opportunity for us to say “happy birthday” to Creative Commons because it turns six today. And you can say happy birthday by giving money here: https://support.creativecommons.org/. But of course you can't sing happy birthday, because it is still under copyright and we haven't cleared those rights. That's what we need to do and your support is really critical.

But I want to end with just one more story. I was asked to go the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, and speak in a beautiful room with red velvet curtains and red carpet. The event had many different aspects. The room was packed with artists and creators and at least some lawyers. All of these people were there because they were eager to learn how they could create using digital technologies while respecting the law of fair use. The people who organized this conference had a lawyer speak on each of the four factors in fair use for 15 minutes with the thought that, by the end of the hour, we'd have an audience filled with people who understood the law of fair use. But as I sat there and watched in the audience, I was led to a certain kind of daydreaming. I was trying to remember what this room reminded me of. And then I recalled when I was a kid in my early twenties, I spent a lot of time traveling the Soviet System, and seeing great halls where the annual conventions took place. And I recognized that the room had reminded me of the Soviet system’s extraordinary tribunals. And I began to wonder, when was it in the history of the Soviet system that the system had failed? And what could you have said to convince people of that? So '76 was way too early, it was still puttering along at that point, '89 was too late: if you didn't get it by then, you weren't going to get it. So, when was it? Between 1976 and 1988, you could have convinced members of the Politbureau that the system had failed. And what could you have said to them to convince them? Knowing that this romantic ideal that they grew up with had crashed and burned, and to continue with the Soviet System was to reveal a certain kind of insanity. Because, as I sat in that room and listened to lawyers insisting, “Nothing has changed. The same rules apply. It's the pirates who are the deviants,” I increasingly recognize that it is we who are insane; that the existing system of copyright simply could never work in the digital age. Either we will force our kids to stop creating, or they will force on us a revolution around copyright law. And, in my view, both options are not acceptable.

Copyright extremists need to recognize that there is a growing movement of abolitionism out there. Kids were convinced that copyright was for another century, and that in the 21st Century it is just not needed. Now, I am not an abolitionist. I believe copyright is an essential part of creative economy. It makes a creative economy rich in both the money and in a cultural sense. So, in this sense, I'm more like Gorbachev in this debate, not like Yeltsin. I'm just an old Communist trying to preserve copyright against these extremisms. Extremisms that will in my view destroy copyright as an important part of creative culture and industries.

Now, you may not be concerned about the survival of copyright. You may say, “Whatever. If it disappears, my machines will still run.” So, if that's not enough to get you into this battle, let me try one last effort. What you know is that there is no way for us to kill this form of creativity. We can only criminalize it. We can't stop our kids from creating in these new ways; we can only drive that creativity underground. We can't make our kids passive the way I at least was, we can only make them “pirates.” And the question is, is that any good? Our kids live in an age of prohibition. All sorts of aspects of their life are against the law. They live their life against the law. But that way of living is extraordinarily corrosive. It is extraordinarily corrupting of the rule of law, and ultimately corrupting to the premise of a democracy. If you do nothing else, after you've supported Creative Commons, you need to support this movement to stop this war now.

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