The O’Reilly Network published an interview with Lawrence Lessing on a topic that Lessig calls remix culture. It reminds me a lot of Bolter’s & Grusin’s work Remediation: Understanding New Media.

Lessig points out that some of the copyright lawsuits are, in actuality, not about copyright but as a means of one company blocking product innovation and the creation of new ways of distributing content: “it’s a strategic opportunity to exercise control over the future of content development and distribution, and not so much as a way of protecting copyrights.”

Lessig mentions the sampling license developed by the Creative Commons that allows for sampling of songs but not for the re-distribution of those songs: “it’s encouraging the kind of creativity that the technology has at its soul: the creativity, which you’re going to see more of in music and film, the creativity of remixing other creativity.”

Central to the concept being explored through this blog is the re-purposing of material. The is expressed elegantly by Lessig and I want to quote him extensively:

One way I’ve begun to think about this is to question whether within our culture, writing is allowed. Now when you say the word writing, for those of us over the age of 15, our conception of writing is writing with text, and in fact our tradition protects the right to write with text and to draw upon other people’s writings with text quite substantially. People can review my book and quote my words in reviewing my book, criticize me, do whatever they want, and that’s protected by a tradition of fair use that has taken hundreds of years to develop but is now pretty strong.

But if you think about the ways kids under 15 using digital technology think about writing–you know, writing with text is just one way to write, and not even the most interesting way to write. The more interesting ways are increasingly to use images and sound and video to express ideas. Well, all of those ways of writing under the law as it’s understood right now are basically illegal unless you secure permission from the author up front. So the same act of creativity in some sense, you know, taking, creating, mixing out of what other people do, is legal in the text world and illegal in the digital media world. And the struggle is to get people to recognize that there’s no good reason for the rules to be so radically different between the two contexts, and that we ought to be encouraging a wider range of creativity using digital media–both because there are many people who would be extraordinarily talented in exploiting those types of creativity, and also because it would really spur growth in collective literacy about how media itself functions and how it has its effect.