Thursday, June 03, 2010
Jan Chipchase on our mobile phones
I live and work from Tokyo, Japan. And I specialize in human behavioral research, and applying what we learn to think about the future in different ways, and to design for that future. And you know, to be honest, I've been doing this for seven years, and I haven't got a clue what the future is going to be like. But I've got a pretty good idea how people will behave when they get there.
This is my office. It's out there. It's not in the lab, and it's increasingly in places like India, China, Brazil, Africa. We live on a planet -- 6.3 billion people. About three billion people, by the end of this year, will have cellular connectivity. And it'll take about another two years to connect the next billion after that. And I mention this because if we want to design for that future, we need to figure out what those people are about. And that's, kind of, where I see what my job is and what our team's job is.
Our research often starts with a very simple question. So I'll give you an example: What do you carry? If you think of everything in your life, that you own, when you walk out that door, what do you consider to take with you? When you're looking around, what do you consider? Of that stuff, what do you carry? And of that stuff, what do you actually use?
So this is interesting to us, because the conscious and subconscious decision process implies that the stuff that you do take with you, and end up using, has some kind of spiritual, emotional or functional value. And to put it really bluntly, you know, people are willing to pay for stuff that has value, right? So I've probably done about five years research looking at what people carry. I go in people's bags. I look in people's pockets, purses. I go in their homes, and we do this worldwide, and we follow them around town with video cameras. It's kind of like stalking with permission. And we do all this -- and to go back to the original question: What do people carry?
And it turns out that people carry a lot of stuff, OK. That's fair enough. But if you ask people what the three most important things that they carry are -- across cultures and across gender and across contexts -- most people will say keys, money, and if they own one, a mobile phone. And I'm not saying this is a good thing, but this is a thing, right? I mean, I couldn't take your phones off you if I wanted to. You'd probably kick me out, or something. OK, it might seem like an obvious thing for someone who works for a mobile phone company to ask. But really, the question is why? Right? So why are these things so important in our lives? And it turns out, from our research, that it boils down to survival -- survival for us and survival for our loved ones.
So keys provide an access to shelter and warmth -- transport as well, in the U.S. increasingly. Money is useful for buying food, sustenance -- among all its other uses. And a mobile phone, it turns out, is a great recovery tool. If you prefer this kind of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, those three objects are very good at supporting the lowest rungs in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Yes, they do a whole bunch of other stuff, but they're very good at this. And in particular, it's the mobile phone's ability to allow people to transcend space and time. And what I mean by that is, you know, you can transcend space by simply making a voice call, right? And you can transcend time by sending a message at your convenience, and someone else can pick it up at their convenience. And this is fairly universally appreciated, it turns out, which is why we have three billion plus people who have been connected. And they value that connectivity.
But actually, you can do this kind of stuff with PCs. And you can do them with phone kiosks. And the mobile phone, in addition, is both personal -- and so it also gives you a degree of privacy -- and it's convenient. You don't need to ask permission from anyone, you can just go ahead and do it, right? However, for these things to help us survive, it depends on them being carried. But -- and it's a pretty big but -- we forget. We're human, that's what we do. It's one of our features. I think, quite a nice feature. So we forget, but we're also adaptable, and we adapt to situations around us pretty well. And so we have these strategies to remember, and one of them was mentioned yesterday. And it's quite simply, the point of reflection. And that's that moment when you're walking out of a space, and you turn around, and quite often you tap your pockets. Even women who keep stuff in their bags tap their pockets. And you turn around, and you look back into the space, and some people talk aloud. And pretty much everyone does it at some point.
OK the next thing is -- most of you, if you have a stable home life, and what I mean is that you don't travel all the time, and always in hotels -- but most people have what we call a center of gravity. And a center of gravity is where you keep these objects. And these things don't stay in the center of gravity, but over time, they gravitate there. It's where you expect to find stuff. And in fact, when you're turning around, and you're looking inside the house, and you're looking for this stuff, this is where you look first, right? OK, so when we did this research, we found the absolutely, 100 percent guaranteed way to never forget anything, ever ever again. And that is, quite simply to have nothing to remember. (Laughter)
OK, now that sounds like something you get on a Chinese fortune cookie, right? But is in fact about the art of delegation. And from a design perspective, it's about understanding what you can delegate to technology and what you can delegate to other people. And it turns out, delegation -- if you want it to be -- can be the solution for pretty much everything, apart from things like bodily functions, going to the toilet. You can't ask someone to do that on your behalf. And apart from things like entertainment, you wouldn't pay someone to go to the cinema for you and have fun on your behalf. Or, at least not yet. Maybe sometime in the future, we will.
So let me give you an example of delegation in practice, right. So this is -- probably the thing I'm most passionate about, is the research that we've been doing on illiteracy and how people who are illiterate communicate. So the U.N. estimated -- this is 2004 figures -- that there are almost 800 million people who can't read and write, worldwide. So we've been conducting a lot of research. And one of the things we were looking at is -- if you can't read and write, if you want to communicate over distances, you need to be able to identify the person that you want to communicate with. It could be a phone number, it could be an e-mail address, it could be a postal address. Simple question, if you can't read and write, how do you manage your contact information?
And the fact is that millions of people do it. Just from a design perspective, we didn't really understand how they did it, and so that's just one small example of the kind of research that we were doing. And it turns out that illiterate people are masters of delegation. So they delegate that part of the task process to other people, the stuff that they can't do themselves. Let me give you another example of delegation. This one's a little bit more sophisticated, and this is from a study that we did in Uganda about how people who are sharing devices use those devices. Sente is a word in Uganda that means money. It has a second meaning, which is to send money as airtime. OK?
And it works like this. So let's say, June you're in a village, rural village. I'm in Kampala and I'm the wage earner. I'm sending money back, and it works like this. So in your village, there's one person in the village with a phone, and that's the phone kiosk operator. And it's quite likely that they'd have a quite simple mobile phone at a phone kiosk. So what I do is, I buy a prepaid card like this. And instead of using that money to top up my own phone, I call up the local village operator. And I read out that number to them, and they use it to top up their phone. So they're topping up the value from Kampala, and it's now being topped up in the village. You take a 10 or 20 percent commission, and then you -- the kiosk operator takes 10 or 20 percent commission, and passes the rest over to you in cash.
OK, there's two things I like about this. So the first is, it turns anyone who has access to a mobile phone, anyone who has a mobile phone, essentially into an ATM machine. It brings rudimentary banking services to places where there's no banking infrastructure. And even if they could have access to the banking infrastructure, they wouldn't necessarily be considered viable customers, because they're not wealthy enough to have bank accounts. There's a second thing I like about this. And that is that despite all the resources at my disposal, and despite all our kind of apparent sophistication I know I could never have designed something as elegant and as totally in tune with the local conditions as this. OK?
And, yes, there is things like Grameen Bank and micro-lending. But the difference between this and that is there's no central authority trying to control this. This is just street-up innovation. So, it turns out the street is a never-ending source of, kind of inspiration for us. And OK, if you break one of these things here, you return it to the carrier. They'll give you a new one. They'll probably give you three new ones, right? I mean that's buy three, get one free. That kind of thing. If you go on the streets of India and China, you see this kind of stuff. And this is where they take the stuff that breaks, and they fix it, and they put it back into circulation.
This is from a workbench in Jilin City, in China, and you can see people taking down a phone and putting it back together. They reverse-engineer manuals. This is a kind of hacker's manual, and it's written in Chinese and English. They also write them in Hindi. You can subscribe to these. There are training institutes where they're churning out people for fixing these things as well. But what I like about this is it boils down to someone on the street with a small, flat surface, a screwdriver, a toothbrush for cleaning the contact heads -- because they often get dust on the contact heads -- and knowledge. And it's all about the social network of the knowledge, floating around. And I like this because it challenges the way that we design stuff, and build stuff, and potentially distribute stuff. It challenges the norms.
OK, for me the streets just raises so many different questions. Like, this is Viagra that I bought from a backstreet sex shop in China. And China is a country where you get a lot of fakes. And I know what you're asking, did I test it? I'm not going to answer that, OK. But I look at something like this, and I consider the implications of trust and confidence in the purchase process, and we look at this and we think, well how does that apply, for example, for the design of -- the lessons from this apply to the design of online services, future services in these markets?
This is a pair of underpants from -- (Laughter) from Tibet. And I look at something like this, and honestly, you know, why would someone design underpants with a pocket, right? And I look at something like this and it makes me question, if we were to take all the functionality in things like this, and redistribute them around the body in some kind of personal area network, how would we prioritize where to put stuff? And yes, this is quite trivial but actually the lessons from this can apply to that kind of personal area networks. And what you see here is a couple of phone numbers written above the shack in rural Uganda. This doesn't have house numbers, this has phone numbers. So what does it mean when people's identity is mobile? When those extra three billion people's identity is mobile, it isn't fixed? Your notion of identity is out-of-date already, OK, for those extra three billion people. This is how it's shifting.
And then I go to this picture here, which is the one that I started with. And this is -- this is from Delhi. It's from a study we did into illiteracy, and it's a guy in a teashop. You can see the chai being poured in the background. And he's a, you know, incredibly poor teashop worker, on the lowest rungs in the society. And he, somehow has the appreciation of the values of LiveStrong. And it's not necessarily the same values, but some kind of values of LiveStrong, to actually go out and purchase them and actually display them.
For me, this kind of personifies this connected world, where everything is intertwined, and the dots are -- it's all about the dots joining together. OK, the title of this presentation is "connections and consequences," and it's really a kind of summary of five years of trying to figure out what it's going to be like when everyone on the planet has the ability to transcend space and time in a personal and convenient manner, right? When everyone's connected.
And there are four things. So the first thing is the immediacy of ideas, the speed at which ideas go around. And I know TED is about big ideas, but actually the benchmark for a big idea is changing. If you want a big idea you need to embrace everyone on the planet, that's the first thing.
The second thing is the immediacy of objects. And what I mean by that is as these become smaller, as the functionality that you can access through this becomes greater -- things like banking, identity -- these things, quite simply move very quickly around the world. And so the speed of the adoption of things is just going to become that much more rapid in a way that we just totally cannot conceive, when you get it to 6.3 billion and the growth in the world's population.
The next thing is that however we design this stuff -- carefully design this stuff -- the street will take it and will figure out ways to innovate, as long as it meets base needs. The ability to transcend space and time, for example. And it will innovate in ways that we cannot anticipate. In ways that, despite our resources they can do it better than us. That's my feeling. And if we're smart, we'll look at this stuff that's going on, and we'll figure out a way to enable it to inform and infuse both what we design and how we design.
And the last thing is that -- actually the direction of the conversation. With another three billion people connected, they want to be part of the conversation. And I think our relevance and TED's relevance is really about embracing that and learning how to listen, essentially. And we need to learn how to listen. So thank you very, very much. (Applause)
Lawrence Lessig: Re-examining the remix
About this talk
At TEDxNYED, former "young Republican" Larry Lessig talks about what Democrats can learn about copyright from their opposite party, considered more conservative. A surprising lens on remix culture.
I want to talk about what we learn from conservatives. And I'm at a stage in life where I'm yearning for my old days, so I want to confess to you that when I was a kid, indeed, I was a conservative. I was a Young Republican, a Teenage Republican, a leader in the Teenage Republicans. Indeed, I was the youngest member of any delegation in the 1980 convention that elected Ronald Reagan to be the Republican nominee for president.
Now, I know what you're thinking. (Laughter) You're thinking, "That's not what the Internets say." You're thinking, "Wikipedia doesn't say this fact." And indeed, this is just one of the examples of the junk that flows across the tubes in these Internets here. Wikipedia reports that this guy, this former congressman from Erie, Pennsylvania was, at the age of 20, one of the youngest people at the Republican National Convention, but it's just not true. (Laughter) Indeed, it drives me so nuts, let me just change this little fact here. (Laughter) (Applause) All right. Okay, so ... perfect. Perfect. (Laughter) Okay, speaker Lawrence Lessig, right. Okay. Finally, truth will be brought here. Okay, see? It's done. It's almost done. Here we go. "... youngest Republican," okay, we're finished. That's it. Please save this. There we go. And ... Wikipedia is fixed, finally. Okay, but no, this is really beside the point.
(Applause)
But the thing I want you to think about when we think about conservatives -- not so much this issue of the 1980 convention -- the thing to think about is this: They go to church. Now, you know, I mean, a lot of people go to church. I'm not talking about that only conservatives go to church. And I'm not talking about the God thing. I don't want to get into that, you know; that's not my point. They go to church, by which I mean, they do lots of things for free for each other. They hold potluck dinners. Indeed, they sell books about potluck dinners. They serve food to poor people. They share, they give, they give away for free. And it's the very same people leading Wall St. firms who, on Sundays, show up and share. And, not only food, right.
These very same people are strong believers, in lots of contexts, in the limits on the markets. They are in many important places against markets. Indeed, they, like all of us, celebrate this kind of relationship. But they're very keen that we don't let money drop into that relationship, else it turns into something like this. They want to regulate us, those conservatives, to stop us from allowing the market to spread in those places. Because they understand, there are places for the market and places where the market should not exist, where we should be free to enjoy the fellowship of others. They recognize, both of these things have to live together.
And the second great thing about conservatives: they get ecology. Right, it was the first great Republican president of the 20th century who taught us about environmental thinking -- Teddy Roosevelt. They first taught us about ecology in the context of natural resources. And then they began to teach us in the context of innovation, economics. They understand, in that context -- free -- they understand free is an important essential part of the cultural ecology as well. That's the thing I want you to think about them.
Now, I know you don't believe me, really, here. So here's exhibit number one. I want to share with you my latest hero, Julian Sanchez, a libertarian who works at the, for many people, "evil" Cato Institute. Okay, so Julian made this video. He's a terrible producer of videos, but it's great content, so I'm going to give you a little bit of it. So here he is beginning.
Julian Sanchez: I'm going to make an observation about the way remix culture seems to be evolving ...
Larry Lessig: So what he does is he begins to tell us about these three videos. This is this fantastic brat pack remix set to Lisztomania. Which, of course, spread virally. Hugely successful.
(Music) And then some people from Brooklyn saw it. They decided they wanted to do the same. (Music) And then, of course, people from San Fransisco saw it. And San Fransisco's thought they had to do the same as well. (Music) And so they're beautiful, but this libertarian has some important lessons he wants us to learn from this. Here's lesson number one.
JS: There's also obviously something deeply great about this. They are acting in the sense that they're emulating the original mashup. And the guy who shot it obviously has a strong eye and some experience with video editing. But this is also, basically, just a group of friends having an authentic social moment and screwing around together. It should feel familiar and kind of resonate for anyone who's had a sing-a-long or a dance party with a group of good friends.
LL: Or ...
JS: So that's importantly different from the earlier videos we looked at because here, remix isn't just about an individual doing something alone in his basement; it becomes an act of social creativity. And it's not just that it yields a different kind of product at the end, it's that potentially it changes the way that we relate to each other. All of our normal social interactions become a kind of invitation to this sort of collective expression. It's our real social lives themselves that are transmuted into art.
LL: And so this libertarian draws from these two points ...
JS: One remix is about individuals using our shared culture as a kind of language to communicate something to an audience. Stage two, social remix, is really about using it to mediate people's relationships to each other. First, within each video, the brat pack characters are used as a kind of template for performing the social reality of each group. But there's also a dialogue between the videos, where, once the basic structure is established, it becomes a kind of platform for articulating the similarities and differences between the groups' social and physical worlds.
LL: And then, here's for me, the critical key to what Julian has to say.
JS: Copyright policy isn't just about how to incentivize the the production of a certain kind of artistic commodity; it's about what level of control we're going to permit to be exercised over our social realities, social realities that are now, inevitably, permeated by pop culture. I think it's important that we keep these two different kinds of public goods in mind. If we're only focused on how to maximize the supply of one, I think we risk suppressing this different and richer and, in some ways, maybe even more important one.
LL: Right. Bingo. Point. Freedom needs this opportunity to both have the commercial success of the great commercial works and the opportunity to build this different kind of culture. And for that to happen, you need ideas like fair use to be central and protected, to enable this kind of innovation, as this libertarian tells us, between these two creative cultures, a commercial and a sharing culture. The point is they, he, here, gets that culture.
Now, my concern is, we Dems, too often, not so much. All right, take for example this great company. In the good old days when this Republican ran that company, their greatest work was work that built on the past, right. All of the great Disney works were works that took works that were in the public domain and remixed them, or waited until they entered the public domain to remix them, to celebrate this add-on remix creativity. Indeed, Mickey Mouse himself, of course, as "Steamboat Willie," is a remix of the then, very dominant, very popular "Steamboat Bill" by Buster Keaton. This man was a remixer extraordinaire. He is the celebration and ideal of exactly this kind of creativity.
But then the company passes through this dark stage to this Democrat. Wildly different. This is the mastermind behind the eventual passage of what we call the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, extending the term of existing copyrights by 20 years, so that no one could do to Disney what Disney did to the Brothers Grimm. Now, when we tried to challenge this, going to the Supreme Court, getting the Supreme Court, the bunch of conservatives there -- if we could get them to wake up to this -- to strike it down. We had the assistance of Nobel Prize winners including this right-wing Nobel Prize winner, Milton Friedman, who said he would join our brief only if the word "no brainer" was in the brief somewhere. (Laughter) But apparently, no brains existed in this place when Democrats passed and signed this bill into law. Now, tiny little quibble of a footnote, Sonny Bono, you might say, was a Republican, but I don't buy it. This guy is no republican.
Okay, for a second example, think about this cultural hero, icon on the left, creator of this character. Look at the site that he built: "Star Wars" MashUps, inviting people to come and use their creative energy to produce a new generation of attention towards this extraordinarily important cultural icon. Read the license. The license for these remixers assigns all of the rights to the remix back to Lucas. The mashup is owned by Lucas. Indeed, anything you add to the mashup, music you might add, Lucas has a worldwide perpetual right to exploit that for free. There is no creator here to be recognized. The creator doesn't have any rights. The creator is sharecropper in this story. And we should remember who employed the sharecroppers: the Democrats, right?
So the point is the Republicans here recognize that there's a certain need of ownership, a respect for ownership, the respect we should give the creator, the remixer, the owner, the property owner, the copyright owner of this extraordinarily powerful stuff, and not a generation of sharecroppers. Now, I think there are lessons we should learn here, lessons about openness. Our lives are sharing activities, at least in part. Even for the head of Goldman Sachs, at least in part. And for that sharing activity to happen, we have to have well protected spaces of fair use.
That's number one. Number two: This ecology of sharing needs freedom within which to create. Freedom, which means without permission from anyone, the ability to create. And number three: We need to respect the creator, the creator of these remixes through rights that are directly tied to them. Now, this explains the right-wing non-profit Creative Commons. Actually, it's not a right-wing non-profit, but of course -- let me just tie it here -- the Creative Commons, which is offering authors this simple way to mark their content with the freedoms they intended to carry.
So that we go from a "all rights reserved" world to a "some rights reserved" world so that people can know the freedoms they have attached to the content, building and creating on the basis of this creative copyrighted work. These tools that we built enable this sharing in parts through licenses that make it clear and a freedom to create without requiring permission first because the permission has already been granted, and a respect for the creator because it builds upon a copyright the creator has licensed freely. And it explains the vast right-wing conspiracy that's obviously developed around these licenses, as now more than 350 million digital objects are out there, licensed freely in this way.
Now that picture of an ecology of creativity, the picture of an ecology of balanced creativity, is that the ecology of creativity we have right now? Well, as you all know, not many of us believe we do. I tripped on the reality of this ecology of creativity just last week. I created a video which was based on a Wireside Chat that I'd given, and I uploaded it to YouTube. I then got this email from YouTube weirdly notifying me that there was content in that owned by the mysterious WMG that matched their content ID. So I didn't think much about it.
And then on Twitter, somebody said to me, "Your talk on YouTube was DMCA'd. Was that your purpose?" imagining that I had this deep conspiracy to reveal the obvious flaws in the DMCA. Answered, "No." I didn't even think about it. But then I went to the site and all of the audio in my site had been silenced. My whole 45 minute video had been silenced because there were snippets in that video, a video about fair use, that included Warner Music Group music. Now, interestingly, they still sold ads for that music, if you played the silent video. You could still buy the music, but you couldn't hear anything because it had been silenced.
So I did what the current regime says I must do to be free to use YouTube to talk about fair use. I went to this site, and I had to answer these questions. And then in an extraordinarily Bart Simpson-like, juvenile way you've actually got to type out these words and get them right to reassert your freedom to speak. And I felt like I was in third grade again. I will not put tacks on the teacher's chair. I will not put tacks on the teacher's chair. This is absurd. It is outrageous. It is an extraordinary perversion of the system of freedom we should be encouraging.
And the question I ask you is: Who's fighting it? Well, interestingly, in the last presidential election, who was the number one, active opponent of this system of regulation in online speech? John McCain. Letter after letter attacking YouTube's refusal to be more respectful of fair use with their extraordinary notice and take down system, that led his campaign so many times to be thrown off the Internet.
Now, that was the story of me then, my good old old days of right-wing lunacy. Let me come back to now, now when I'm a little leftist -- I'm certainly left handed, so at least a lefty -- And I wonder, can we on the left expect to build this ecology of freedom, now, in a world where we know the extraordinarily powerful influences against it, where even icons of the left like this entertain and push bills that would effectively ban the requirement of open access for government funded research? The president, who has supported a process that secretly negotiates agreements, which effectively lock us into the insane system of DMCA that we have adopted and likely lock us down a path of three strikes, you're out that, of course, the rest of the world are increasingly adopting. Not a single example of reform has been produced yet. And we're not going to see this change in this system anytime soon.
So here's the lessons of openness that I think we need to learn. Openness is a commitment to a certain set of values. We need to speak of those values. The value of freedom. It's a value of community. It's a value of the limits in regulation. It's a value respecting the creator. Now, if we can learn those values from at least some influences on the right, if we can take them and incorporate them, maybe we could do a little trade. We learn those values on the left, and maybe they'll do health care or global warming legislation or something in the right.
Anyway, please join me in teaching these values.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
At TEDxNYED, former "young Republican" Larry Lessig talks about what Democrats can learn about copyright from their opposite party, considered more conservative. A surprising lens on remix culture.
I want to talk about what we learn from conservatives. And I'm at a stage in life where I'm yearning for my old days, so I want to confess to you that when I was a kid, indeed, I was a conservative. I was a Young Republican, a Teenage Republican, a leader in the Teenage Republicans. Indeed, I was the youngest member of any delegation in the 1980 convention that elected Ronald Reagan to be the Republican nominee for president.
Now, I know what you're thinking. (Laughter) You're thinking, "That's not what the Internets say." You're thinking, "Wikipedia doesn't say this fact." And indeed, this is just one of the examples of the junk that flows across the tubes in these Internets here. Wikipedia reports that this guy, this former congressman from Erie, Pennsylvania was, at the age of 20, one of the youngest people at the Republican National Convention, but it's just not true. (Laughter) Indeed, it drives me so nuts, let me just change this little fact here. (Laughter) (Applause) All right. Okay, so ... perfect. Perfect. (Laughter) Okay, speaker Lawrence Lessig, right. Okay. Finally, truth will be brought here. Okay, see? It's done. It's almost done. Here we go. "... youngest Republican," okay, we're finished. That's it. Please save this. There we go. And ... Wikipedia is fixed, finally. Okay, but no, this is really beside the point.
(Applause)
But the thing I want you to think about when we think about conservatives -- not so much this issue of the 1980 convention -- the thing to think about is this: They go to church. Now, you know, I mean, a lot of people go to church. I'm not talking about that only conservatives go to church. And I'm not talking about the God thing. I don't want to get into that, you know; that's not my point. They go to church, by which I mean, they do lots of things for free for each other. They hold potluck dinners. Indeed, they sell books about potluck dinners. They serve food to poor people. They share, they give, they give away for free. And it's the very same people leading Wall St. firms who, on Sundays, show up and share. And, not only food, right.
These very same people are strong believers, in lots of contexts, in the limits on the markets. They are in many important places against markets. Indeed, they, like all of us, celebrate this kind of relationship. But they're very keen that we don't let money drop into that relationship, else it turns into something like this. They want to regulate us, those conservatives, to stop us from allowing the market to spread in those places. Because they understand, there are places for the market and places where the market should not exist, where we should be free to enjoy the fellowship of others. They recognize, both of these things have to live together.
And the second great thing about conservatives: they get ecology. Right, it was the first great Republican president of the 20th century who taught us about environmental thinking -- Teddy Roosevelt. They first taught us about ecology in the context of natural resources. And then they began to teach us in the context of innovation, economics. They understand, in that context -- free -- they understand free is an important essential part of the cultural ecology as well. That's the thing I want you to think about them.
Now, I know you don't believe me, really, here. So here's exhibit number one. I want to share with you my latest hero, Julian Sanchez, a libertarian who works at the, for many people, "evil" Cato Institute. Okay, so Julian made this video. He's a terrible producer of videos, but it's great content, so I'm going to give you a little bit of it. So here he is beginning.
Julian Sanchez: I'm going to make an observation about the way remix culture seems to be evolving ...
Larry Lessig: So what he does is he begins to tell us about these three videos. This is this fantastic brat pack remix set to Lisztomania. Which, of course, spread virally. Hugely successful.
(Music) And then some people from Brooklyn saw it. They decided they wanted to do the same. (Music) And then, of course, people from San Fransisco saw it. And San Fransisco's thought they had to do the same as well. (Music) And so they're beautiful, but this libertarian has some important lessons he wants us to learn from this. Here's lesson number one.
JS: There's also obviously something deeply great about this. They are acting in the sense that they're emulating the original mashup. And the guy who shot it obviously has a strong eye and some experience with video editing. But this is also, basically, just a group of friends having an authentic social moment and screwing around together. It should feel familiar and kind of resonate for anyone who's had a sing-a-long or a dance party with a group of good friends.
LL: Or ...
JS: So that's importantly different from the earlier videos we looked at because here, remix isn't just about an individual doing something alone in his basement; it becomes an act of social creativity. And it's not just that it yields a different kind of product at the end, it's that potentially it changes the way that we relate to each other. All of our normal social interactions become a kind of invitation to this sort of collective expression. It's our real social lives themselves that are transmuted into art.
LL: And so this libertarian draws from these two points ...
JS: One remix is about individuals using our shared culture as a kind of language to communicate something to an audience. Stage two, social remix, is really about using it to mediate people's relationships to each other. First, within each video, the brat pack characters are used as a kind of template for performing the social reality of each group. But there's also a dialogue between the videos, where, once the basic structure is established, it becomes a kind of platform for articulating the similarities and differences between the groups' social and physical worlds.
LL: And then, here's for me, the critical key to what Julian has to say.
JS: Copyright policy isn't just about how to incentivize the the production of a certain kind of artistic commodity; it's about what level of control we're going to permit to be exercised over our social realities, social realities that are now, inevitably, permeated by pop culture. I think it's important that we keep these two different kinds of public goods in mind. If we're only focused on how to maximize the supply of one, I think we risk suppressing this different and richer and, in some ways, maybe even more important one.
LL: Right. Bingo. Point. Freedom needs this opportunity to both have the commercial success of the great commercial works and the opportunity to build this different kind of culture. And for that to happen, you need ideas like fair use to be central and protected, to enable this kind of innovation, as this libertarian tells us, between these two creative cultures, a commercial and a sharing culture. The point is they, he, here, gets that culture.
Now, my concern is, we Dems, too often, not so much. All right, take for example this great company. In the good old days when this Republican ran that company, their greatest work was work that built on the past, right. All of the great Disney works were works that took works that were in the public domain and remixed them, or waited until they entered the public domain to remix them, to celebrate this add-on remix creativity. Indeed, Mickey Mouse himself, of course, as "Steamboat Willie," is a remix of the then, very dominant, very popular "Steamboat Bill" by Buster Keaton. This man was a remixer extraordinaire. He is the celebration and ideal of exactly this kind of creativity.
But then the company passes through this dark stage to this Democrat. Wildly different. This is the mastermind behind the eventual passage of what we call the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, extending the term of existing copyrights by 20 years, so that no one could do to Disney what Disney did to the Brothers Grimm. Now, when we tried to challenge this, going to the Supreme Court, getting the Supreme Court, the bunch of conservatives there -- if we could get them to wake up to this -- to strike it down. We had the assistance of Nobel Prize winners including this right-wing Nobel Prize winner, Milton Friedman, who said he would join our brief only if the word "no brainer" was in the brief somewhere. (Laughter) But apparently, no brains existed in this place when Democrats passed and signed this bill into law. Now, tiny little quibble of a footnote, Sonny Bono, you might say, was a Republican, but I don't buy it. This guy is no republican.
Okay, for a second example, think about this cultural hero, icon on the left, creator of this character. Look at the site that he built: "Star Wars" MashUps, inviting people to come and use their creative energy to produce a new generation of attention towards this extraordinarily important cultural icon. Read the license. The license for these remixers assigns all of the rights to the remix back to Lucas. The mashup is owned by Lucas. Indeed, anything you add to the mashup, music you might add, Lucas has a worldwide perpetual right to exploit that for free. There is no creator here to be recognized. The creator doesn't have any rights. The creator is sharecropper in this story. And we should remember who employed the sharecroppers: the Democrats, right?
So the point is the Republicans here recognize that there's a certain need of ownership, a respect for ownership, the respect we should give the creator, the remixer, the owner, the property owner, the copyright owner of this extraordinarily powerful stuff, and not a generation of sharecroppers. Now, I think there are lessons we should learn here, lessons about openness. Our lives are sharing activities, at least in part. Even for the head of Goldman Sachs, at least in part. And for that sharing activity to happen, we have to have well protected spaces of fair use.
That's number one. Number two: This ecology of sharing needs freedom within which to create. Freedom, which means without permission from anyone, the ability to create. And number three: We need to respect the creator, the creator of these remixes through rights that are directly tied to them. Now, this explains the right-wing non-profit Creative Commons. Actually, it's not a right-wing non-profit, but of course -- let me just tie it here -- the Creative Commons, which is offering authors this simple way to mark their content with the freedoms they intended to carry.
So that we go from a "all rights reserved" world to a "some rights reserved" world so that people can know the freedoms they have attached to the content, building and creating on the basis of this creative copyrighted work. These tools that we built enable this sharing in parts through licenses that make it clear and a freedom to create without requiring permission first because the permission has already been granted, and a respect for the creator because it builds upon a copyright the creator has licensed freely. And it explains the vast right-wing conspiracy that's obviously developed around these licenses, as now more than 350 million digital objects are out there, licensed freely in this way.
Now that picture of an ecology of creativity, the picture of an ecology of balanced creativity, is that the ecology of creativity we have right now? Well, as you all know, not many of us believe we do. I tripped on the reality of this ecology of creativity just last week. I created a video which was based on a Wireside Chat that I'd given, and I uploaded it to YouTube. I then got this email from YouTube weirdly notifying me that there was content in that owned by the mysterious WMG that matched their content ID. So I didn't think much about it.
And then on Twitter, somebody said to me, "Your talk on YouTube was DMCA'd. Was that your purpose?" imagining that I had this deep conspiracy to reveal the obvious flaws in the DMCA. Answered, "No." I didn't even think about it. But then I went to the site and all of the audio in my site had been silenced. My whole 45 minute video had been silenced because there were snippets in that video, a video about fair use, that included Warner Music Group music. Now, interestingly, they still sold ads for that music, if you played the silent video. You could still buy the music, but you couldn't hear anything because it had been silenced.
So I did what the current regime says I must do to be free to use YouTube to talk about fair use. I went to this site, and I had to answer these questions. And then in an extraordinarily Bart Simpson-like, juvenile way you've actually got to type out these words and get them right to reassert your freedom to speak. And I felt like I was in third grade again. I will not put tacks on the teacher's chair. I will not put tacks on the teacher's chair. This is absurd. It is outrageous. It is an extraordinary perversion of the system of freedom we should be encouraging.
And the question I ask you is: Who's fighting it? Well, interestingly, in the last presidential election, who was the number one, active opponent of this system of regulation in online speech? John McCain. Letter after letter attacking YouTube's refusal to be more respectful of fair use with their extraordinary notice and take down system, that led his campaign so many times to be thrown off the Internet.
Now, that was the story of me then, my good old old days of right-wing lunacy. Let me come back to now, now when I'm a little leftist -- I'm certainly left handed, so at least a lefty -- And I wonder, can we on the left expect to build this ecology of freedom, now, in a world where we know the extraordinarily powerful influences against it, where even icons of the left like this entertain and push bills that would effectively ban the requirement of open access for government funded research? The president, who has supported a process that secretly negotiates agreements, which effectively lock us into the insane system of DMCA that we have adopted and likely lock us down a path of three strikes, you're out that, of course, the rest of the world are increasingly adopting. Not a single example of reform has been produced yet. And we're not going to see this change in this system anytime soon.
So here's the lessons of openness that I think we need to learn. Openness is a commitment to a certain set of values. We need to speak of those values. The value of freedom. It's a value of community. It's a value of the limits in regulation. It's a value respecting the creator. Now, if we can learn those values from at least some influences on the right, if we can take them and incorporate them, maybe we could do a little trade. We learn those values on the left, and maybe they'll do health care or global warming legislation or something in the right.
Anyway, please join me in teaching these values.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
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