The Chicago Tribune interviews leading copyright liberalization advocate Lawrence Lessig and Ken Waagner, who runs Wilco's Internet operations:
- Have you both heard "The Grey Album"? What do you think of it?
Ken Waagner: I think it's interesting. I don't think it's an amazing album, but I think the concept is really amazing and it's pretty well executed.
Lawrence Lessig: Well, I'm a lawyer so I don't know anything about the quality or the taste. . . . I find it amazing that it generated the level of protest that it generated. Because you know five years ago, I don't think there would have been the ability to build an online protest movement around copyright, but this is what they did.
It's one thing to defend fair use in an ordinary case, but this was a pretty blatant taking without any permission of other people's work and remixing it. And the idea that that would have generated the political response that it did—I think it's bad news for the record companies.
Waagner: I think the record companies forced people's reactions. Sometimes it seems to me that they're just trying to shoot themselves in the foot, [trying to] self-inflict the injury to make it worse than it really is, just to get more pity and to get more legislation, "See how bad we're damaged?"
Like when they announced their figures were down again this year and just really complaining, and by how badly they're handling the public relations of the whole situation.
Lessig: My organization, Creative Commons, has this license that [Brazilian musician and activist] Gilberto Gil has pushed us to create, which is called a mash license. A mash license says, "You're allowed to take my content, you're allowed to sample my content for creative purposes, even for commercial purposes you can sample my content—you can do that all without hiring a lawyer or talking to me ever. What you're not allowed to do is take a verbatim copy of my content and distribute that."
So when Gil got us to do that license, he wanted to release a bunch of his content under that license. Warner [Brothers Records, Gil's label] said, "Absolutely not." He said, "Why? What possible reason would there be? This would inspire a great new burst of creativity around my work." [But the labels are] still stuck in this [mentality of], "We've got to control absolutely everything."
Waagner: The thing that just keeps coming back is that the record industry had distribution pretty well put into a box. They controlled physical distribution—if you wanted to play the game, you had to get into [their] system.
But isn't the central issue compensation—shouldn't the Beatles make money from their compositions, shouldn't Wilco make money from their records?
Lessig: Well, I'm a strong believer in copyright. And in my view, what copyright is is the right of the author to control what happens to his or her work. In my view, that means if Gilberto Gil says, "I want my work to be available for other people to build on top of even without paying me," he should be allowed to do that. There shouldn't be a record company that says to him, "No, we're not going to let you do that." I wouldn't favor forcing artists to turn over their work, but I would favor allowing artists to be much more creative about the ways they distribute their work.
Article comments
1 - Martin Blank
I think without a doubt the Internet can be employed as a fabulous tool to promote bands to semi-stardom who otherwise would have never been heard anywhere, anytime, outside their home towns and perhaps a very tiny worldwide cult following. But, I firmly believe that the amount of play in copyright and licensing is up to the artist -- music, literature, film, etc. This is why the "mash license" intrigues me: it gives the original artist greater flexibility in saying, You can use this for reasonable interpretations, or, without issuing such a license, You may never use this under any circumstances whatsoever without paying me.
I further believe that Cory Doctorow is a hack and a blemish on contemporary literature -- granted, I am no doubt overly picky when it comes to novelists -- but he has done the writing community a great service with his most recent book: he proved that you can release a novel for absolutely no cost via the Internet and not remarkably undermine retail sales of the book.
On the other hand -- one must love symmetry! -- the fact that you may so freely publish books or music on the Internet, no editorial and production talent involved, puts the onus on the unwashed masses to separate the meritorious from the schlock, to send the *real* hero up the pop charts. Are the filthy rabble up to the task?