I just watched a registration of a presentation by Larry Lessig at TED (using miro, which gets better every week) about creative freedom and read-write culture. Over the last few years I’ve read a lot of Lessig his work, and I’m impressed at how the same message comes across when he delivers it as a presentation.
I feel like I’m one of the kids he mentions (though at 24, people tend to treat me as an adult!), and the “remixing” story he tells seems so obvious and natural to me. I grew up with the web, and I grew up as a participant in online communities.
It seems right now a lot of the attention in this creative freedom arena is going to online video at the moment, which is where I also have a bit of a professional interest. It is not easy to figure out how to help shape a digital world where amateur and professional content can coexist well together, and moreover mesh and intermingle freely. Like Lessig explains, we need to find the right balance. Media companies must accept some loss of control over the user experience, and in return the users have to accept that while sharing is good, stealing is bad, and that creators have some rights they must respect.
Hopefully we will find a path to a healthy and sustainable ecosystem for digital media. To me it’s obvious we’re not there yet, but I see progress happening by leaps and bounds everywhere I look. These are exciting times!
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