Lessig on Openness

Lawrence Lessig, at a talk given at TEDxNYED March 6, 2010, does a wonderful job of modeling how we can work together to accomplish copyright policy change that is in the best interest of freedom and our kids’ future, rather than reinforcing the polarizing type of rhetoric heard from both conservatives and liberals alike. He encourages us to teach the values of freedom, community, limiting regulation, respecting the creator and other issues of fair use,  while teaching us a thing or two about copyright and the shift in the process. The talk is brilliant and absolutely TED quality.  Watch the video and then my comments will be inserted below the clip.

LIBERTARIAN LESSONS

I love the Libertarian Lessons he shares about the remix examples he includes. The distinction is an important one– that this new participatory culture encourages “authentic social moments” where creating a mashup or remix becomes less about infringement of commercial copyright and more about fellowship or an act of social creativity. That this type of remix is actually changing the  way we relate to each other in that our social interactions become a type of collective expression.

The arts and pop culture have always reflected society.

“However; regardless of the graphic method, … art has always depicted our social values, racial attitudes, lifestyles, fashion and political views in a way that is only seen in the art form. It reflected who we were, who we were supposed to be, and at times, led who we became.” Gary Freiberg

In my elementary classroom about 10 years ago I use to do remixes with visual art as a way of social play and a more engaged way for students to relate to the message of the painting and artist. It was also a way for us to look at society in the era we were studying. In the case of the pic below we were studying ancient Greece during the time of Socrates.

Death of Socrates- original

Death of Socrates- remix

Even though it is visual art and not video it represents individuals (in this case 5th graders) using culture as a shared language in order to communicate about what they were learning together. This was not only a learning experience in and of itself but a way these 5th graders mediated relationships with one another around the learning.

Our students need to be afforded  the opportunities to allow these social co-creations and representations to enrich their lives and creativity.

DOVE TAILED IDEAS
One of the things I enjoyed most about TED was the way the ideas of the speakers dove tailed and brought a tacit validation to the concepts presented earlier. Lessig’s piece underscored both Henry Jenkins who talked about participatory culture and David Wiley’s talk on Open Education.

David defines open ed- “Teaching materials freely shared with permissions to engage in the 4R activities.” (Reuse, Redistribute, Remix, Redefine). He likens educators who will not give open access to content they create to bees. They sting once and then die without the ability to recreate and extend what they have created through selfless sharing.

MISUSE OF CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE

One story Lessig told particularly caught my interest was the one about Disney. If you watched the clip you will remember that Walt was the expert at remixing popular culture pieces into children movies with the same theme, but after he died his predecessor made sure that “No one could do to Disney what Disney did to the Brothers Grimm.” I fear one particular danger with CC will be folks who try and abuse the license by taking a license like Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License and getting the part about how they can use the content and remix but ignoring the piece where they also have to give the same right to remix to their remixed product.

Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

I have had this happen to a product I created where a large organization decided to take advantage of the CC license I used and copied what I was doing to the letter, (not much building upon) without changing anything.

Two things they did bothered me greatly.

1) They charged for their version of my model, even though the license allows for noncommercial uses only. (They didn’t even change the price)

2) They immediately slapped an “all rights reserved” license on what they had borrowed from me.

I believe that we will begin to see litigation over issues like this more and more as the participatory culture begins to license their intellectual work in ways that allow for creative reuse.