Freedom of the Internet

I am standing on the shoulders of giants, yet these giants are now asking me to step down.

Until recently, like most people my age, my interest in copyright law, the public domain, and the "digital domain" was minimal. Sure, I understood the importance of the Internet and I loved Napster, but I knew very little about the how the Internet afforded me the freedom that it did. What mattered to me at the time was that I could IM my friends from around the country about my college shenanigans, download images, music and sound clips: everything from a memorable Simpson's line to a crazy collaboration between Brian Eno and Lisa Loeb.

The 1990s were great times, but then April 13, 2000 arrived and the honeymoon ended. The headlines were everywhere. Napster would soon be shutting its doors.

But the Napster case was just the beginning. In the years since it has become more and more clear that the Internet is changing. Gone are the days of free access to all content --not just music -- and what lies ahead is an even bleaker picture. Unless we do something about it.

How did we come to this point? The story starts with copyright laws.

Imagine for a moment that you are a video artist who is working on a new movie. In this movie, you would like to include the title track from Coldplay's newest album. In order to do so you must pay -- and rightfully so -- the record label, or whoever owns the copyright, to use the song. But what about the large Ansel Adams poster in the living room of your movie set, or the truck with the advertisement that drives through the street while you're filming? Will you have to pay for these incidental objects? The answer is yes.

As Larry Lessig says in his book, The Future of Ideas, "I would say to an 18 year-old artist, you're totally free to do whatever you want. But -- and then I would give him a long list of all the things that he couldn't include in his movie because they would not be legally cleared. That he would have to pay for them [So freedom? Here's the freedom: You're totally free to make a movie in an empty room with two of your friends]."

		Resources Opsound is a record label using an open source, copyleft model, an experiment in practical gift economics, a laboratory for new ways of releasing music. Public Knowledge is a new public-interest advocacy organization dedicated to fortifying and defending a vibrant information commons. The Center for Digital Democracy is a nonprofit organization working to ensure that the digital media systems serve the public interest. Connexions is an open source education project looking to provide a wealth of knowledge from grades K-6, middle and high school, undergraduate and graduate courses for free to the public.

Have you noticed how many things are copyrighted these days? Suddenly phrases, songs, ideas that have been around for years are showing up with little trademark TMs beside them, meaning they are seen as belonging to one person (or in most cases, one giant company). These companies tell us that the current copyright laws are a way to protect an artist (as in the case with Napster) but most artists themselves feel the laws have gone too far, and that sharing and cross-pollination is the best way to ensure sustainable creativity.

Artists are constantly interacting with one another's work. Sometimes this means an indirect reference that the audience won't recognize, but sometimes it also means replicating, messing with and imitating other artists. Most hip-hop songs are filled with melody and beat samples from other songs, and artists like Andy Warhol are famous for using fragments of images that were deemed public in their work (like his famous Campbell's Soup can paintings). Borrowing from other artists becomes a way for us to comment on and critique the media-saturated world that surrounds us.