Sunday, March 27, 2011

blog #9



What I see as Lessig's key argument in the introduction is that every artist at some point in time had to have had reflected on anothers work/art to create what they create now.  "No artist works in a vacuum."  So what the law is saying in the introduction with the mother using youtube for her baby dancing, The Girl Talk mash up, and even the John Lennon piece is that they don't really care in a sense.  In one example, the person they were trying to get permission from didn't even read the proposal, they just said NO.  And this is the problem.  The law needs to understand that this is whats going to happen in the future and that that they need to update their codes,laws, and rules to adapt to the ever growing change in copyright laws.  It should be like how SilviaO experiences music now.  People can sample her LEGALLY.  They even talk about how everyone does it and its illegal.  But if we move forward to getting all the crap out of the way and just getting the permission done right away, works of art like the John Lennon piece would not be slowed and kept away from the public.  We are shooting ourselves in the foot from keeping "remixing" a crime when in reality we have been doing it since the beginning for a long time.  Just like how he explains it with the Africans and they way they share their stories, how they always evolve and get better.  This is how everything we work with in art, music, and creativity should be, moving forward, evolving into something better.


RW (read/write) which is explained as reading their culture or by listening to representations of it.  As for RO (read/only) he explains it as less practiced and more simple with consumptions.  Basically he thought that the culture would be lost from the practice of "real musicians" as more and more people could create what Sousa spent his lifes work on so easily with "machines."  This matters to Lessigs argument in a sense that instead of creating more culture with new ways to be creative and remixing information to create, Sousa is saying we are loosing culture.  Sousa's extremism was based on the fact that we need to go back to RW and less RO or else we will loose our culture.  I guess hes trying to say we might forget our roots.  But how will we forget them, if this notion of remixing is basically uncovering the pass again to create something new.  He argues that people will not even have a vocal chord left.  Jokingly but in a way I get what hes saying.  Hes saying that we as a people will loose the disciplines that create music.  Like practicing with instruments and learning how to make music.  But we live in a new era.  Why stop it from evolving?  Lessig already explains way before Sousa argued about copyrights that its been RO even since the early 1900s.  People buying and selling new technology, he even explains how the piano being sold to the masses more and more was RO.  And then Currier straight up embarasses Sousa in their little conversation telling him that his memory of people singing in the streets, that is illegal.  He showed Sousa that the law has gone far enough with this and shouldnt go any further.  







1 comment:

  1. Nice job bringing together your own opinions with a summary of the text. (and great image!) Your Sousa point could've been a bit more nuanced, but overall you're on the right track. Good post.

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