Never − fewer − more

Lawrence Lessig’s speech at the O.Reilly Open Source Conference in 2002 is captured here at the Free Culture part of the Creative Commons. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation to fight for copyright freedoms and presents a history of copyright throughout Western history. Over the years, technology has enabled control to be tightened until freedoms we had just a few years ago are gone or are dissappearing. At the beginning of the 21st Century, “Never in the history of the world have fewer people controlled more of our culture.”

He starts with a refrain:

1. “Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.”
2. “The past always tries to control the future that builds upon it.”
3. “Free societies enable the future by limiting the past.”
4. “Ours is less and less a free society.”

However, what Hollywood’s advocates like Jack Valenti (of the MPAA) or Hillary Rosen (of the RIAA) don’t see is that “re-architecting the network destroys innovation and creativity.” There will be no new investment in stagnation. The course being run now is extremely short-term (a few decades at most, despite more Orwellian predictions), but will be terrible for culture during that period. “Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors”, but, as he demonstrates with Disney Inc., which built its whole empire on appropriated cultural content, if the current companies built on the past and they manage to legislate that future companies can’t do the same with the culture created by current companies, where will the next generation of companies come from? Where will our culture and economy come from? Culture will flourish again, but for a while, if we do nothing, it will be a cookie-cutter, locked-down, paid-for culture. To which Lessig emphatically asks, “What have you done [to change it]?”

He also points out that, unfortunately, the U.S. climate today is ripe for this type of takeover. In a way, these companies have been preparing our attention spans since childhood, making sure we can’t focus on tough issues so they can take full control of our lives. J.C. Watts (Congress, R. Okla.) gives the reason he’s retiring early this year: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” What that means is that it’s too difficult to fight for issues that require explanation (which is most of the ones worth fighting for) because people aren’t interested. If you have to explain what you mean, you’ve already lost because the collective eyes have glazed over.

Lessig also points out that this control is largely unnecessary to the profits of media companies. They’re fighting an imaginary foe for reasons that bespeak a terribly singular ideology. They just want every possible cent from the masses; they want to control us, have power over us. And they’ll get it by getting us to agree that we’re stealing from them and we deserve whatever punishment they want to mete out. There is no longer a provider/consumer relationship…it’s more akin to a tender/herd relationship: the needs of the herd aren’t as important as the needs of consumers would be. Last year, a year during which it’s claimed that 5 times as many CDs were traded online as were sold, revenues on music sold dropped an incredible 5%. As Lessig points out, anyone with any sense would attribute that to the hideous recession we’re still in. Hollywood took it as a rallying cry to legislate a closing down of the culture and keep it all to themselves.

At the end, he makes a pitch for help. It’s not a hard sell, but it makes sense in light of what he’s saying. If you don’t like what’s happening, what are you doing about it? More importantly, which side are you (un)consciously supporting? He asks whether you give more to organizations like EFF, which fight for a free culture, than you give to your local telco monopoly or the monopoly that controls your DSL line or the Blockbuster’s or those $10 movie tickets or your $50-60 cable bill? Add up all the money you spend supporting the existing monopolies and think about which side you’d like to be on.

I highly recommend the Flash version of the presentation, which runs 31' 40".