Last night was a sold-out lecture at the New York Public Library’s Celeste Bartos forum, featuring Steven Johnson, Lawrence Lessig, and Shepard Fairey speaking on a panel titled “Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy.” The panel posed their guiding question as follows: “What is the future for art and ideas in an age when practically anything can be copied, pasted, downloaded, sampled, and re-imagined?” The audience was mostly what you’d imagine, on the younger side and with a visible hipster contingent. It doesn’t seem to be available on iTunes yet (search “nypl”), but I’m betting it will be eventually, which would be rather in keeping with the panel’s topic. I came, of course, because of my interest in the political economy of textual production, distribution, appropriation, use, and re-use; and because of the ways I see that cycle relating to what we (me, you, our students, our colleagues) do in the classroom, but also because it was an excuse to get into the city on a weeknight, to have a tasty NYC meal (OMG Bangladeshi spiced lamb), and to feel like a bit of an itinerant again, at loose ends and doing interesting things.

The panel began with Andrew Filipone Jr.’s hilariously surreal and somewhat menacing video of Charlie Rose interviewing himself, titled “Charlie Rose by Samuel Beckett,” as a sort of introduction to the panel’s concern with remixing.

Steven Johnson then started his talk by suggesting that what he hoped would be exciting about the panel conversation would be both its timeliness and its timelessness.

These issues, he stressed, are truly old issues, with deep roots in American culture. As a first example, he offered Joseph Priestley’s composing of his volume, “A History of the Corruptions of Christianity.” Priestley (who was one of the founders of my own faith) believed that Christ’s essential message of grace and redemption had been corrupted throughout history by layer after layer of fearful beliefs in magic and superstition, and Priestley wanted to see a return in attention to what was most important about Jesus’s life. (At one point, Johnson noted, a mob burned down Priestley’s house because of what he wrote in his scholarly concordance in tracing how various writers throughout history had introduced those corruptions into the original nature of the faith.) The book made its way across the Atlantic, to eventually be read by Thomas Jefferson, who read it and subsequently made the book the foundation of his entire religious system of individual faith.

In fact, Jefferson adapted Priestley’s book into one of his own, “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, Extracted Textually from the Gospels,” colloquially known as “Jefferson’s Bible.” This, Johnson asserted, is a remix. One of the most important of our founding fathers adapted and recombined Priestley’s text, for deeply personal reasons, to make a new statement in a new way about the world. Furthermore, while this stands as a prominent example, it hardly stands alone: the cultural and intellectual innovations of enlightenment culture, Johnson claimed, were due in large part to sharing. Placing ideas into the open space of the intellectual and cultural commons will gather, in Benjamin Franklin’s words, “the attentions of the ingenious.” In that light, Johnson pointed out, our culture’s contemporary need to bring Congress and lawyers and court cases into that intellectual and cultural commons is, to say the least, curious. Innovations come not from protecting ideas, but from connecting them.

Lawrence Lessig then began his talk with a quotation from Aldous Huxley: “In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that general artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity.” Clearly, there’s a technological connection from our present circumstance to Huxley’s 1927 remark, and there’s evidence as well that our concerns today about capital-intensive processes replacing labor-intensive processes in the production of culture are hardly new, and Lessig amplified and reinforced his point by bringing up the argument from John Philip Sousa that he’s mentioned before, offered in 1906 testimony to Congress against the use of the phonograph:

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 old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left. The vocal chord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.

The quality of reproducibility that the phonograph represented offered Lessig a conceptual transition to the work of co-panelist Shepard Fairey. Lessig said, with an ironic half-smile, that Fairey provided something radically new to the artistic world, and then went on to show historical examples of paintings and photographs that remixed prior composition: clearly, Fairey’s remixing stood as an instance of a long and valuable tradition of artistic remixing. He was the first, however, to compose the Obama poster — which, of course, has gotten in some legal trouble, as well. Lessig showed the Obama poster, and then surrounded it with a grid of eight other photographs extremely similar to the one taken by Mannie Garcia of the Associated Press, asking Fairey, “Is this the one that inspired you?” (No.) “This one?” (No.) “This one?” And so on. It was funny, and in good fun — but the point, Lessig noted, was that Fairey’s poster went on to inspire other people, as well.

Again (dude: what’s wrong with your ear?): this is an old, old story. There was the Beatles’ “White Album,” Jay-Z’s “Black Album,” and DJ Danger Mouse’s remix of the two into “The Grey Album.” More recently, there’s Greg Gillis’s recombination of hundreds of samples into new songs as Girl Talk. There are anime music videos like “Muppet Hunter D,” and political statements like will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” remix of Obama’s speech, or the familiar “Read My Lips” Bush/Blair remix by Johan Söderberg, or this one:

Lessig offered other examples as well: videos of people dancing in response to other peoples’ videos of themselves dancing; the scores of “All the Single Ladies” dancing remixes; and the “Crank Dat Soulja Boy” remixes — Super Friends, Simpsons, Family Guy, and this one:

Crank Dat Soulja Boy - Bambi 2

These are conversations, Lessig asserted, and as such, they stand as a perfect example of the sort of collaborative culture Sousa was talking about — and as evidence that Huxley was wrong: the “atmosphere of passivity” has been transformed.

The new approach of the law to these expressions of creativity, however, is disturbing. Lessig offered the example of the woman who took a video of her very young son dancing to a barely-audible “Let’s Go Crazy” and uploaded it to YouTube to share with family members, and then received notification that YouTube had taken the video down because the video — in that barely-audible few seconds of staticky music — was an infringement of copyright. Why, Lessig asked, is it necessary to invoke Congress and its laws in order to protect against that mother’s extraordinary and rapacious infringement?

This, then, becomes the question: what should the law do? How do we regulate intellectual property? For many in the audience, both the questions and the answers were self-evident: we’re familiar with Lessig’s work, so his rhetorical move in pointing out that today we do so via copyright and the way it produces incentives for authors to create by placing certain restrictions on speech, was a play to a broader audience than that of scholars interested in intellectual property. It worked, but it was a curious situation for me to feel myself in; to hear a respected scholar reiterating the most basic and fundamental topoi of the conversation I’ve found myself at the fringes of for the past few years, to hear him asserting that we limit freedom in order to produce more free speech, but we know that regulation imposes costs, and so we must ensure that the benefits of regulation exceed the costs.

As an example of thinking about alternatives to copyright, Lessig proposed we imagine a culture in which one requires permission from an author to quote that author’s work. The author can say yes, no, or ask for money. This would clearly benefit authors, Lessig suggested, but the cost would wildly overwhelm the benefit. To extend the hypothetical example: we could presume that everything needs permission to remix, or we could presume that everything is free to remix. Requiring permission would present no change to the incentive of the original artist, but challenges to the remix would be huge, thereby resulting in the first alternative — permission — driving production underground. Presuming remixing is free, on the other hand, results in negligible additional costs to so-called “original” production, but offers immense benefits to the possibility of remixed production and therefore to the production of additional artifacts of culture. I’m interested here in the cost-benefit analysis Lessig is performing, and wish he had spent more time with it: in offering these hypothetical examples, there were quite a few implicit assumptions that I wish he’d spelled out more, particularly in the area of what, precisely, he sees as being these incentives and benefits. In other words: in setting up these examples, how is Lessig defining “cost” and “value”?

His solution, in any case, is clear: deregulate the remix.

(Really? Really? In a time when we’re seeing, in every aspect of the economy, the grievous perils of deregulation? I mean, I agree with him — yes, very much so — but what if we imagine the opposite case? What if we play the doubting game, and imagine that the RIAA and MPAA have valid complaints, that the apocalypse of intellectual property is coming like a mortgage meltdown: who suffers, and how? If we’re wrong in espousing the ideals Lessig proposes, who’s our Bernie Madoff, and whose are the suicides we’re implicitly responsible for when it all goes to hell?)

But Lessig’s solution is not what we see today. Today, we see more regulation, not less. We see senseless, hopeless wars over intellectual property; we see Jack Valenti calling people who violate copyright “terrorists”; we see the RIAA’s copyright war threatening 28,000 kids. And the law, both as a tool to stop this war and as a tool to stop the remix as a form of expression, has failed. When he saw this failure, Lessig acknowledged, his first thought was to imagine that the members of Congress who make policy were idiots: instead, he realized, he was the idiot. The mistake Congress made in passing the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act had nothing to do with stupidity, or whether the act advanced the public good: rather, the mistake had to do with what Lessig called “the economy of influence” that drives Congress.

As an example of that economy of influence, Lessig offered HR 801, sponsored by Representative John Conyers, which would make research sponsored by the National Institute of Health, a government organization, subject to copyright protections and thereby removed from the public domain and dedicated to enriching publishers, rather than making such research freely available to all the American taxpayers who paid for that research. Who benefits from such a law? Publishers. Who contributes to Conyers? Publishers. In the academic system of publication, we write our articles for free, we review our peers’ articles for free, we take our peers’ articles through the process of publication for free — but Conyers would apparently like for multinational publishing conglomerates to profit further from all that free labor, not just by exorbitant subscription fees, but by making sure that taxpayer-funded research costs money for taxpayers to access.

This is corruption. Not graft, no; not bribery, but corruption: the influence of material gain upon the ethical conduct of our everyday lives. One thing we should recognize, Lessig concluded, is that we can’t kill remixing: we can only criminalize it. We can’t make the kids for whom these acts of remixing are so integral to their culture passive — we can only make them pirates. And in a circumstance wherein normal behavior is outlawed, is criminalized, the net effect is a corrosion of the rule of law.

(That’s how Lessig concluded his talk. Next was the discussion, which I’ll do my best to account for soon. As always, any misrepresentations are entirely my own, and I’ll do my best to correct them quickly.)

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 10:24 pm and is filed under Economics, Intellectual Property. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.