Copyright and Creativity?

Just watched Larry Lessig’s TED presentation on the new generation, copyright law and the creative culture.  Wow! He hit the nail on the head for how I feel about copyright Nazis. Why demonize something so creative and so (relatively) harmless as grabbing a piece of copyrighted material and making something cool with it for not-for-profit entertainment? Why make kids, and not just kids, live “against the law” as Lessig so accurately describes at the end of his presentation? Why not let common sense into the discussion? For hundreds, thousands of years, songs have been passed down from generation to generation, changed, altered. Even the Star-Spangled Banner “stole” a melody from a popular drinking song of the time!

When we make laws so restrictive that a massive number of people, a whole generation, find their natural tendency to buck the law, there is definitely something wrong there.

I’m reminded of one of my husband’s favorite web finds, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog. This mini-series, featuring Neil Patrick Harris, was produced for a song during the Hollywood writers’ strike. The producers distributed it on the web for free for a short period of time to generate interest and to show that good, really creative material can be produced inexpensively at a time when people were demanding more money, spending more money, and creating mediocre, if not awful, material. After a set period of time, the video was taken down from the web, but not before a huge following was created, a following that was encouraged to produce their own music video applications to the Evil League of Evil. The best were featured on the DVD in the special features, and anyone who sent in a video was listed in the credits. How cool is that?

My husband, both because he loved the movie and because he loved the fact that the producers were bucking the trend, decided he HAD to buy the DVD to support them.