Here’s a good clip in which Lawrence Lessig and Stephen Colbert square off on copyright:
Photographer John Harrington makes a good point in his analysis: it’s a lot easier to be permissive about open copyrights and making your work available for free after you’ve already made your money from it.
This is something I struggle with in my own photography; I’d like to be able to share my work, see people do cool things with it, and theoretically have that circle back to me in the form of more business. But as a business, it’s tough to justify giving up those rights and income without proof or confidence that there will be a return from freeing it.
Perhaps there’s strength in the idea of hybrid businesses that implement both sides of Lessig’s hybrid economy: a protected avenue of content that generates income, and an open, possibly parallel avenue of content that fuels artistic expression, community-building, and personal branding.
February 1st, 2009 at 2:31 pm
This is an important issue, but a lot of people, just like the host in this show, simply shut it off without any constructive reasoning. I think we’ll have to see big changes in the next few years to adjust to the unstoppable sharing phenomenon and those with flexible minds will probably have the better share of the business.
Thanks for raising the issue,
D