| Escaping the Country of the Blind | 2005-03-25 15:35 2 comments |
 by Flemming FunchWade Roush made some thorough Notes from a very nice speech by Lawrence Lessig last week. About how important it is that we're free to remix media, as we always could before the digital age. You know, you could buy a magazine, cut out the pictures and make a collage and show it to people. And you can make a funny hat out of the rest of the magaine. Now, with the internet and lots of new tools, people are doing all sorts of creative things that reuse content in interesting ways. But there are strong forces that are trying to make all of that illegal. If they have their way, you can only use media they've sold you in the exact way they had in mind. You know, you can only watch this DVD twice, and only on your own TV. Or you can only watch this broadcast program on Thursdays and you can't fastforward over the commercials. No getting creative and using it differently. "We’ve set up a system of regulation so that these forms of expression are illegal. So we can’t teach them to our kids--that would be schools promoting piracy. We can’t promote them with our businesses. All we can do is focus on how to punish those who write with the ordinary tools of the 21st century.He's making a very appropriate reference to an HG Wells story about somebody arriving in a city of blind people, and not quite behaving "right" according to their norms before they got the bright idea of removing what was wrong with him - his eyes. |