Remix:
Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
by Lawrence Lessig
KF3020 .L47 2008
New Book Island, 2nd floor
This week’s featured book should resonate with anyone that has ever downloaded music from Napster (back when it was ‘free’), killed time watching videos on YouTube or cited Wikipedia. These websites are products of our culture, where sharing is caring and intellectual property laws, namely copyright, take a backseat. Is this a bad thing?
Lessig, Stanford law professor and the founder of the Center for Internet and Society, begins his latest work by using the example of a mother that recorded her toddler dancing to a Prince song and uploading the video to Youtube. The video was subsequently pulled from the site because the music producer had not authorized the ‘performance’ and thus the mother violated copyright. Lessig contends that copyright is no longer performing its original purpose and that it is actually hampering innovation from those who ‘remix’ original works to create their own. With this book, the author offers a solution in which artists, whether ‘professional’ or Joe the Plumber, are not criminalized for their actions and that both commercial and creative interests are served.
The Library also owns Lessig’s previous titles, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (ZA3225 .L47 1999), Future of Ideas (K1401 .L47 2002) and Free Culture (KF2979 .L47 2004), available in the Main Collection.
