Tag Archives: Amateurism

In Defense of Amateurism on the Web

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Here’s another quote from Lawrence Lessig’s Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy that caught my attention:

Just as Jefferson romanticized the yeoman farmer working a small plot of land in an economy disciplined by hard work and careful planning, just as Sousa romanticized the amateur musician, I mean to romanticize the yeoman creator. In each case, the skeptic could argue that the product is often better produced elsewhere–that large farms are more efficient, or that filters on publishing mean published works are better. But in each case, the skeptic misses something critically important: how the discipline of the yeoman’s life changes him or her as a citizen. The Long Tail enables a wider range of people to speak. Whatever they say, that’s a very good thing. Speaking teaches the speaker even if it just makes noise. (p. 132)

Lessig on Copyright Newly Expanding Control Over Amateurs

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Here’s a choice nugget from Lawrence Lessig’s book, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy:

Second, digital technologies also change how RW [read-write] culture and copyright interact. Because every use of [a digital] creative work technically produces a copy, every use of [a digital] creative work technically triggers copyright law. And while many of these uses might be fair use, or uses licensed, expressly or implicitly, by the copyright owner, the critical point to recognize is that this is still a vast change to the history of American copyright law. For the first time, the law regulates ordinary citizens generally. For the first time, it reaches beyond the professional to control the amateur–to subject the amateur to a control by the law that the law historically reserved to professionals.

This is the most important point to recognize about the relationship between the law and RW culture. For the first time, the law reaches and regulates this culture. Not because Congress deliberated and decided that this form of creativity needed regulation, but simply because the architecture of copyright law interacted with the architecture of digital technology to produce a massive expansion in the reach of the law. (p. 103)