Culture Trends in America: intellectual property and the information age

"So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in culture that we don't even question when the control of that property removes our ability, as a people, to develop our culture democratically."



~Lawrence Lessing~

I have a confession to make; I have trouble feeling bad about file sharing. And I am not alone. p2pnews reports that as of October 2004 over four and a half million p2p users online at any given moment. Amazingly, that’s just the statistics for American IPs. Add in the global IPs and you can tack on another two million users. Mind you, these are not monthly or even daily numbers; they are a moment by moment average of users. The obvious question that these statistics being up is this: why is it that so many people don’t find an issue with crossing intellectual property boundaries? Is this just perhaps a practical extension of the maxim that everyone would be a thief if they knew they would be caught? After all, though there is some chance of litigation against a file sharer, its likelihood is truly remote. Lifehacker puts the matter succinctly: “The RIAA has conducted about 26,000 lawsuits, and there are more than 15 million music downloaders. Mark Mulligan of Jupiter Research said it best: "If you're a file sharer, you know that the likelihood of you being caught is very similar to that of being hit by an asteroid." So is that it? Are people just amoral when they don’t fear punishment? While I agree that may be part of the answer, I don’t feel that it is the whole of it. Other concurrent trends are emerging that point to a complete shift in the way we think about intellectual property. One of the most prominent of those trends is the growing community of writers, artists, musicians, and software developers who embrace the concept of remix culture. Remix culture is a term first coined by creative commons founder Lawrence Lessing to describe a culture that embraces the natural creativity of the individual. In a remix culture, changing and improving music, literature, art and software is not just tolerated but encouraged. Furthermore, the individual would be free to use the creator’s intellectual property in any non-commercial way (Mr. Lessing has written a freely available e-book on this topic). This vision of a free information society is really resonating, and has already produced some amazing but controversial works of art, music and software. One of the most notable is the grey album by dj dangermouse. This freely distributed album was a creative remix of the black album by Jay-Z and the Beatles white album. Another thriving creative commons community is sourceforge. Sourceforge is a community of software developers, and most work under creative commons license to write software for the masses. These are but a few examples of how our culture is evolving into a free information society. I think that the attempts of the RIAA , MPAA and other corporate entities to strictly control their intellectual property is not a matter of catching pirates, but of trying to stop an entire culture from undergoing a paradigm shift. That, I believe, is why these organizations will ultimately fail. The future of intellectual property demands new methods of monetization. The old models are broken, and trying to fight a culture shift is just a good way to get plowed under by the ideas of the future. While the RIAA may be having a fit, this brave new cultural frontier is actually very exciting for the individual and the creator. A remix culture will bring about a new level of intimacy between the creator and the consumer, and will empower the average individual to produce and create without the need of an expensive and restrictive middleman. It’s the future, and I say bring it on!