In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

| 155 11 REMIX How Creativity Is Being Strangled by the Law Lawrence Lessig I’ve written five books. Four of these books are extraordinarily depressing. I like depressing, deep, dark stories about the inevitable destruction of great, fantastic ideas. After my first child was born, my thinking began to shift some, and I wrote Remix, which is quite new in the collection because it’s a fundamentally happy book or, at least, mostly a happy book. It’s optimistic. It’s about how certain fantastic ideas will win in this cultural debate. Though the problem is that I’m not actually used to this optimism; I’m not used to living in a world without hopelessness. So I’m actually moving on from this field to focus on a completely hopeless topic, solving problems of corruption, actually. Completely hopeless. But I am happy to come here to talk about this most recent book. I want to talk about it by telling you some stories, making an observation , and constructing an argument about what we need to do to protect the opportunity that technology holds for this society. There are three stories. The first one is very short. A very long time ago, the elite spoke Latin, and the vulgar, the rest of the people, spoke other languages: English, French, and German. The elite ignored the masses. The masses ignored the elite. That’s the first story. Very short, as I promised. Here’s number two: In 1906, John Philip Sousa traveled to the United States Congress to talk about phonographs, a technology he called the “talking machines.” John Philip Sousa was not a fan of the talking machines. He was quoted as saying, “These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy, in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cords will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.”1 156 | Lawrence Lessig I want you to focus on this picture of “young people together singing the songs of the day or even old songs.” This is culture. You could call it a kind of read/write culture. It’s a culture where people participate in the creation and re-creation of their culture. It is read/write, and Sousa’s fear was that we would lose the capacity to engage in this read/write creativity because of these “infernal machines.” They would take it away, displace it, and in its place, we’d have the opposite of read/write creativity: a kind of read-only culture. A culture where creativity is consumed, but the consumer is not a creator. A culture that is top down: a culture where the “vocal cords” of the millions of ordinary people have been lost. Here is story three: In 1919, the United States voted itself dry as it launched an extraordinary war against an obvious evil—a war against the dependence on alcohol, a war inspired by the feminist movement, a war inspired by ideas of progressive reform, and a war that was inspired by the thought that government could make us a better society. Ten years into that war, it was pretty clear this war was failing. In places around the country, they asked how we could redouble our efforts to win the war. In Seattle, the police started to find ways to fight back against these criminals using new technology: the wiretap. Roy Olmstead and eleven others found themselves the target of a federal investigation into his illegal production and distribution of alcohol. His case, Olmstead v. the United States (1928), was heard by the Supreme Court to decide whether the wiretap was legal.2 When the police tapped the phones of Olmsted and his colleagues, they didn’t get a judge’s permission, or a warrant, they just tapped the phones. The Supreme Court looked at the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” Chief Justice Taft concluded that the wiretap was not proscribed by this amendment. He said the Fourth Amendment was designed to protect against trespassing. But wiretapping doesn’t involve any necessary trespass: they didn’t enter Olmstead’s home to attach...

Share