Connect @ The Learning Commons

For those of you who watch The Colbert Report (and also manage to make it through the interviews at the end of Colbert’s political and popular culture commentary) you may already be familiar with this book, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig. In the interview Colbert debates the sharing and commercial economies building into what Lessig defines as the hybrid or remix economy.

If you are interested in current and future debate on issues of copyright, fair use, and intellectual property then you should definitely check out this book. Those of you in applied design programs would find this book particularly compelling because of its discussion of various copyright infringement cases (e.g., the YouTube video that was yanked from the web because it featured a toddler dancing to a Prince song playing faintly in the background). If you have ever been curious about current debate and theory on the state of copyright in a world of blogs, wikis, YouTube, and other mashup technologies then this is an excellent place to start.

Lawrence Lessig, one of the original founders of the Creative Commons (an organization devoted to allowing creators to define how their work can be used), offers a challenging look at the current state of copyright and intellectual property law by juxtaposing various sharing and commercial economies, among them Amazon.com, Wikipedia, YouTube, as well as open source programming languages and operating systems built upon the principle of crowdsourcing (or what Lessig refers to as digital sharecropping).

Asking critical questions of the users and creators in these hybrid economies, Lessig calls for a change in copyright and intellectual property law, and throughout the book, offers thoughtful criticism on this tension between the tradition of copyright law (e.g., filing for copyright through the U.S. Copyright Office) and the nature of a hybrid economy. What emerges is a series of suggestions for change to entrenched intellectual property law, as well as a sincere hope for cogent and responsible protection of creative works as they exist in a community of commerce and sharing.