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Home  News The Creative Commons
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The Creative Commons |
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17.03.2004. |
'What if the law had said that you need someone's permission before taking their image?' So asked Lawrence Lessig, to draw our attention to what the consequences might have been for photography and film if they had been regulated as closely when they first emerged as the internet is today.
Lessig was speaking at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) in London in January 2004, to coincide with the launch of the UK branch of the Creative Commons initiative, which he has helped to pioneer.
The aim of Creative Commons is 'to build a layer of reasonable, flexible copyright in the face of increasingly restrictive default rules' (1).
By asking the question about photography and film, Lessig sought to illustrate the effect that today's intellectual property (IP) regime threatens to have on creativity and technology.
Lessig gave the example of a recent, low-budget documentary film about a musical performance. The filmmakers discovered that the character of Homer Simpson from The Simpsons appeared for three-and-a-half seconds, on a barely visible television, in the background of a key shot.
In accordance with the strict IP laws in operation today, the filmmakers were forced to ask Fox Broadcasting Company, owners of The Simpsons, for permission to include the shot. Fox said that they would de happy to grant permission...for $10,000.
It doesn't take much imagination to see the obstacles to any form of creative activity, if creators have to agonise constantly over excluding anything that could be construed as an explicit reproduction of (part of) another creative work, or including it and paying an exorbitant fee. This effectively prevents creators from depicting and interpreting the world as it actually is - that is, crammed with a variety of cultural products. But Lessig argued that 'before the internet, I don't think that mattered. The burden of the law, before the internet, was not the real burden. The real burden was the burden of economics'.
In short, it was not economically feasible before the internet existed to operate a perfect system of intellectual property control. There was always some scope for engaging in creative activity that passed beneath the radar of the content industry, which could only afford to seek out and clamp down on the biggest threats to its profits, turning a blind eye to lesser infractions.
Today, the content industry is seriously trying to prevent any unauthorised consumption or modification of content on the internet. One of the key tools for this clampdown is digital rights management (DRM) technology.
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