Odyssey Online

…as a follow up to this summer past’s blogging on the Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig has an article in the Huffington Post–a rambling article which includes commentary on being misquoted in the great othersphere known as the Internet–in which he calls for remixing to find its place in the school curriculum, or, at least, that kids should be taught that the remix is a creative skill akin to writing or drawing.  That one could really get them going in the teacher’s lounge…

…to conclude this summer’s blog about the Creative Commons, a sampling of those on the other side of the fence. Of course, not everyone believes that the kind of reform folks involved with the CC wish to bring about is in the best interests of readers and writers.  One of the most impassioned defenses of copyright and challenges to the CC was written by Mark Helprin (who has written a number of novels and several collections of short stories), and was published in the form of a book titled Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto.    Helprin states his book is “..an affirmation of human nature versus that of the machine, via  a defense of copyright, the rights of authorship, and the indispenability of the individual voice.” (xii)  The “rights of authorship” for Helprin boil down to truth: The rights of authorship, the most effective guarantor of which is copyright, protect fact  from casual manipulation; slow the rush to judgment; fix responsibility; encourage conscience in assertion and deliberation; and protect the authority of the individual voice, without which we are little more than nicely yoked oxen. (66)  Helprin doesn’t say “maybe,” and this is a well written book very much worth the time in a serious contemplation of the Creative Commons.

Vacation is now upon Odyssey Online, so look for the posts to cease for a little while…back in mid-August with blogging on the full spectrum of stuff that catches our attention here…

…when thinking about what the CC is trying to do with/for digital mediums, one should think about open source computing, and what open source is trying to accomplish.  A seminal figure in the creation of open source programs is Richard Stallman, who developed GNU, and open source operating system.  Along with his incredible work as a programmer (see Rebel Code: The Inside Story of Linux and the Open Source Revolution by Glynn Moody for a lucid description of Stallman’s work and accomplishments…) he is the author of the Free Software Definition.  While the title is exceedingly prosaic, this is in fact one of the most important statements for access to software as a right, as an essential part of living in our society.  If you are interested in thinking about ownership and access to media this short document should receive careful review, and certainly figures into thinking about the CC…

…a week ago was it, I blogged about Steven Harnard’s vision for online repositories of scholarly journals, and how it forms a “sort of” precursor to the CC.  Another piece to consider in, if you will, immediate ancestors of the CC is Selling Wine Without the Bottles by John Perry Barlow.  Mr. Barlow was one of the techno-utopians of the 1990’s who foresaw revolutionary positive change coming from the Internet. Written in 1993, this piece predicts that the Internet will render copyright obsolete, and while as prediction it’s off base, Barlow’s thoughts on who really owns an idea are fascinating, and a good precursor of the CC.

…just a little ahead of the Creative Commons came Steven Harnard.  Out on a listserv Mr. Harnard published a short post called A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing (the text of said and much commentary from others on his ideas can be found here).  In a word, Harnard calls upon scholars to forgo the traditional model of publishing in a scholarly journal, and instead calls on them to make their work available through a new freely available peer review system, to be built on the Internet.  While there is much scholarship now available on the Internet (as Google Scholar so ably reveals), the wholesale conversion Harnard hoped for never happened. However, he is an interesting precursor to the Creative Commons, and speaks to one of the glaring needs the CC tries to address.

A background on the unfortunate economics of scholarly journal publishing can be found here…

…a visual representation of the Creative Commons from the Art Happens Here blog (recommended by artist and friend Amy Hauber).  The Art Happens Here space on the image is the Remix. So if indeed the Internet is a palate for mixing media, Remix happens here.

…speaking of reading, back in January at our CC presentation Amy Hauber recommended this,  The New Creativity is Solving Problems Together by Stuart Cunningham.  It’s a short and well written piece, and speaks to the collaborative premise of the creative commons. Central to the Remix is voices rather than authorial voice. Hence, the granting of great rights to access content in the CC License.  Mr. Cunningham’s essay is an interesting take on this collaborative premise…

…last time we pointed to the work of Lawrence Lessig.  While Lessig’s work is not hard to Google-‘n-get, but we’d like to draw attention to a text by Lessig that is a little off the beaten path, and is titled Code and the Commons. It was originally a speech given at Fordham University on February 9th, 1999, and what is so interesting about the speech is how he demonstrates that html was the dynamic that drew the concept of the commons, and intellectual property together into what become the CC.  This narrative from the talk illustrates the convergence (it’s a little long (by blog post standards)):

The idea of Lex Informatica, or code, is this: That what makes
cyberspace so different is that it is constituted by these laws of
nature that we write. What defines the experience that cyberspace
is is a set of instructions written into code that we, or more
precisely, code writers, have authored. This code sets the rules of
this space; it regulates behavior in this space; it determines what’s
possible here, and what’s not possible. And as we look to this code
maturing, Reidenberg rightly saw that this code would become its
own type of law. That we could define life in cyberspace as we
wanted — with privacy, or without; with anonymity or without;
with universal access, or without; with the freedom to speak and
publish, or without — and then write what we wanted into the
code. The code would then regulate life there. And that regulation
through code Reidenberg called Lex Informatica.
It’s almost four years since Reidenberg first started talking
about this form of law, and we are just on the cusp of a time when
others can begin to get the point he saw then. For as the code of
cyberspace is maturing, we are beginning to see just how radically
different the world can be. And we are beginning to see how
important it will be for us to take a hand in this construction.

An early work by Lessig (he even uses the term cyberspace), but an important one I think in understanding the way the Internet is a foundation to concept of the CC, and how the concept of the CC might be an enduring legacy of the Internet.

Years ago in the days before the World Wide Web, someone described the Internet as “an organization run by nobody.”  Like the Internet, the Creative Commons is venture driven by interested parties, not a platform for a person on persons with one point of view.  However, if you had to a identify a spokes-person for the CC, it would be Lawrence Lessig.  Lessig’s work on intellectual property and digital technologies evolved into what we now understand as the Creative Commons.

Lessig is an active speaker and writer. He was  recently announced a hiatus from blogging, but his blog site is still a venue for publishing a great deal of his material.    We have a number of his books in the collection (Free Culture, The Future of Ideas, and Remix). Further, if you venture to Facebook and search his name, you’ll see Lawrence Lessig’s Facebook page, where he has posted, among other things, video of several talks he’s given. If you are interested in the CC, it’s worth the time to get to know Lessig’s work.

Remix is a core concept, and essentially an inspiration for the whole Creative Commons concept.  The idea is that as discourse becomes digital, it becomes quickly and easily interchangeable.  From this elasticity comes the idea (possibility?) of people showing their creativity in remixing songs themselves, or splicing different discourses together to create something new.  Think of it as making collages, only, collages with moving parts (film, music, animation, etc.) Therein lies the rub: does slicing together existing digital discourse constitute originality, or is it taking other people’s stuff?

The creative commons has stuff on remix here (with examples), and Uwe Hermann has some good “practical examples” here…