blog twelve

I really enjoyed watching RIP! A Remix Manifesto because it wasn’t your typical boring school movie (that most of us know too well). The filmmaker was a big fan of Lawrence Lessig, and it was interesting to see an appearance of the author in this film.

It was hard for me to think about what the blog was asking because I was so interested in the film itself. I had to re-read the assigned reading this week and refer back to my notes in order to make three connections between the film and the reading. Here’s what I came up with:

1. Intellectual Property
Lessig refers to the idea of intellectual property several times throughout his book, and I would say that it is a prominent theme in some of the sections and chapters. In a section titled “Strong Incentives Will Increasingly Drive Commercial Entities to Hybrids,” Lessig discusses this concept:
“Indeed, our intellectual biases about concepts like property lead us almost naturally to believe that the best strategy to produce wealth is to maximize control over the assets we have, including (and most important here) intellectual-property assets” (228).
This relates to RIP because the filmmaker talks a lot about the ways in which companies control what is produced, and how people are always trying to gain the maximum wealth and control of things they “own.”

2. “The past controls the future.”
This was one of the “4 Rules” that the filmmaker set up within, and I think that it is really relevant to Lessig’s ideas as well. Everyone can look at examples from the past, and see how things may or may not have worked, or how things went wrong. Lessig uses examples from the past like the CD database (or CDDB). CDDB is what Lessig describes as “mutual free riding gone bad” (237). Learning from this past example that allowed people to freely write and provide information, we now know that this probably wasn’t the best thing to do, considering it may have given people too much access.

3. Remix Culture
We know a lot about remix culture from Lessig’s example of RO and RW cultures. In this week’s reading, I can relate this idea of a remix culture to the section where Lessig describes the idea of the hybrid.
“Every company building a hybrid will face exactly the same challenge: how to frame its work, and the profit it expects in a way that doesn’t frighten the community. ‘Mutual free riding’ will be the mantra, at least if the value to both sides can be made more clear” (237).
This made me think of the idea of remix culture, because though we live in one, is it possible to truly do so if people are constantly being sued or reprimanded for remixing. Mutual free riding is something that people do when the download, share, click, etc. That is a true remix culture, but some would argue that it isn’t possible. The film refers to remix culture as well, particularly when they used the example of Brazil as a remix culture. It is a little hard for me to remember exactly what the filmmaker was saying, but I do remember how he described Brazil of a more mutual “sharing” culture.

blog eleven

In chapter 7 of Lessig’s Remix, we learn about both commercial and shared economies. Lessig describes commercial economies as those that build their value, starting with funds. In contrast to that is a shared economy. A shared economy is what Lessig describes as an economy that builds value without regard to money.

He explains that both of these described economies are crucial to life, “both online and offline” (177).

This distinction between the two economies seems vastly important to what Lessig is saying here, due to his concept of a “hybrid economy.” A hybrid economy is exactly what it sounds like—a hybrid between a shared economy and a commercial economy. This hybrid would build upon both economies, to create one that would “dominate.”

When looking back to what we have read so far, we know that one of Lessig’s main goals is to explain how the past teaches us about value of a remix, yet the present teaches us about the new “hybrid economy.” The future will benefit both commerce and community. His website states, “that future will benefit…if the lawyers could get out of the way, it could be a future we could celebrate” (Lessig).

His title even alludes to this “hybrid economy,” which is clearly one of his main points. That is what makes his explanations of commercial and sharing economies so crucial. That distinction is what makes a hybrid economy.