Reading Response: Patronage and Permission

In Free Culture Lawrence Lessig illustrates how the (d)evolution of copyright law and its often renegade corporate enforcement (through code, use fees and litigation threats) has produced a culture of creative permission rather than creative freedom. Despite an American tradition of encouraging derivative creativity for the development of public knowledge, copyright law has transitioned from solely a publishing issue that affected a relatively small subset to a tightly controlled issue of transformation that affects everyone.

Lessig asserts that the protection of derivative rights is the most significant change in copyright law, which has effectively cast everyone under suspicion—from students to artists to anyone wishing to express herself. And while the copyright net has recently been cast more widely to regulate (and capture) a larger group than that original small subset of publishers, the law, as it is currently enforced, seems to protect only the concentrated few who can threaten and pay for litigation—namely corporations.

Fair use is no longer the accepted norm that provides amnesty to uses that fall outside of copyright law restrictions, but is now a fuzzy notion that corporations use “as a sword” (i.e., “pay me or I’ll litigate until the end of time.”) The creative process has become a process of paying lawyers—in Lessig’s words, of protecting businesses, not artists.

In fact, through the increasing concentration of corporate creative ownership, it seems that artists who make a living through mainstream media may not always own their own work (e.g., Fox trumping Max Groening’s and Gracie Films’ decision to allow a Simpsons clip to be included in a documentary or FCC regulation changes allowing television networks to be content owners of productions). While historical values encouraged creators to freely build on past creations to avoid a society of patronage, it seems that this type of corporate ownership (and corporate chokehold) of individual creativity has created a system of patronage.

Ironically, while more of our culture is owned by the powerful few, we have access to one of the most democratic tools for learning, expression and transformation ever: the Internet. Lessig argues that the Internet affects how our culture is made through noncommercial creativity. However, the litigious nature of our corporate patrons and their ability to enforce beyond the copyright law’s intent through technological code strips that democracy away. And what we value becomes our ability to avoid becoming bankrupt after a corporate lawsuit.

It is quite telling that Lessig defines transformation as the creation of new content or new ways of doing business (emphasis mine) and then later states, “A society that defends the ideals of free culture must preserve precisely the opportunity for new creativity to threaten the old.” Clearly, the old way of doing business is threatened, and it will do everything in its power to preserve itself. In the end, though, creativity loses, and permission wins, and so goes our culture.