On 27 May Stanford lawyer-activist Lawrence Lessig spoke at the Royal Geographic Society in London as part of the LIFT Festival. I was an adviser to LIFT on this talk.
I was pleased that Lessig had developed the examples of the kind of creative activities that were being restricted by the current IP system, as his cases had become a little repetitive. He showed lovely examples from Dog Kennel Hill School in the UK (which I learned he had only visited the day before), and a great 'remix' of Peanuts characters dancing to Teenage Fanclub (or something similar). Unfortunately he is still touting contributions to the 'Bush in 30 Seconds' project, which are generally patronising and stupid, and likely to unnecessarily put some people off supporting the Creative Commons initiative.
He is one of the most inspiring speakers around. His presentation was brilliantly coordinated with his talk, elegantly integrated his AV assets, and rounded off with a soap box call to arms. Perhaps because someone was signing his talk, he spoke very slowly and deliberately, which added to the impact of his delivery.
A nice point he made in the 'rip, mix, burn' discussion was that "culture is not delivered in final form", reflecting the design world discussion about adaptive design. However, he over-emphasises the contrast between today's consumer/editor youths and the older generation, as if we have always been couch potatoes and never 'flipped' our cultural artifacts into creative activity. He did make a nice point about creative activity, saying that it encouraged people to think critically. "People who thought they knew what they thought find that when they have to write out their arguments that they sometimes don't make sense", he said.
Lessig is a true hero in the network society, and is pretty unimpeachable. (In fact, the level of applause was a bit too 'celebrity' for me.) But his attitude towards the great unwashed is a little worrying. "In the US we have no political discourse", he argued. "Fox News calls itself 'fair and balanced', and most people who watch it think it is. We are pathologically pathetic, a bovine culture." By 'we' he clearly didn't mean himself, or this audience. In his discussion about 'us and them' he noted that he expected the audience saw themselves as 'us'. "The thing that is standing in the way [of intelligent political discourse] is a bunch of legal rules", he concluded.
Wrong. What is standing in the way is a lack of big ideas, and uninspiring opposition politicians. (Anyone for Kerry? Or Howard?) As I noted in my Register article 'The future of Weblogging' there is no comparison between the intellectual-property-based suppression of political debate today and the wholesale suppression seen Britain at the time of the Chartists (or the Soviet Union, etc). Lessig over-eggs the legal and IP issues, and I guess this is to be expected given his trajectory. This is where his rhetorical approach feels a little odd. Making a call to arms speech about intellectual property law in a public lecture (along with the audience's adulation) felt a little odd. In an age when no one trusts politicians, intellectual property lawyers can become our knights on white chargers.
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