The Creative Commons
The great enabler of crowdsourcing
Johannes Kuhn interviews Lawrence Lessig via telephone
Lawrence Lessig is a professor at Stanford Law School and founder of its Center for Internet and society. His concept of Free Culture has become very popular, as well as Creative Commons. He is currently in Berlin where he is working on a new book, which is about the possibilities a more open copyright would bring for businesses.
Johannes Kuhn: After Kahle vs Gonzalez was refused to be brought to a revision recently, which are the next steps for bringing an opt-in version of copyright?
Lawrence Lessig: Right now, the 10th court of appeal in Denver is deciding on a related case. I am optimistic, because if they accept our view then we will have a case at the Supreme Court.
From the legislative standpoint we are still pushing to bring in new laws. I don’t think there will be a chance of new laws that I like to be introduced anytime soon. The Orphan Works legislation proposal of the copyright office will probably come into law this year, but it is very badly crafted.
Q: What are the most important things to be solved to make the internet a place to share and mashup things?
A: There has to be a recognition that the law of copyright should not regulate Viacom the same as a kid in his dormitory mashing up videos. The architecture of copyright recognition we have right now basically extends it to any time there is a physical copy made of something, which is a far too broad reach. The critical thing to recognize is that the trigger of copyright law makes no sense and we need to find a new frame for it.
Q: What effect does the sharing economy have on business as a whole?
A: What the economy people thought for a long time was the computer was good to watch television. But now we have people creating things, remixing them and using them creatively – which has lead to a much more vital internet economy than the “tv-computer”-idea could have produced. But there are efforts from the industries from the past to control how these things in the future will develop.
Q: Do you think the market concentration that has happened in the new media could harm your idea of a free culture?
A: I do not think we have seen enough so far to resolve the question of market power in the web 2.0 world. It is quite clear that Google possesses a big deal of market power because they built a platform that has features that keeps people there. They have not acted bad in any way now – but I do think that a lot of businesses have to wonder how they will behave and act when Google posseses the market power they are trying to reach.
Q: Do you think crowdsourced activities are a way of building your own base of knowledge, material to use?
A: Crowdsourcing is the latest buzzword, I like the term sharing economy better: People working for free creating value for the world. Sometimes the work produced can be used by people, sometimes by companies. The business of the future will be hybrid.
Q: Will people still be contributing things for free, once companies start to pay them money?
A: For people and communities who are involved in those projects and contribute value for free, different rules apply. It depends on the relation of the community to the company. Wikipedia leaves a 100 million dollars on the table because they do not run ads, Wikia does and it is expecting a faster growth rate. So there has to be sense of understanding people in the community that sets the context of what you are allowed to do.
Q: If you look at creative commons licenses and the use of things for “non commercial activities” – where do you draw the line? If you use it and publish it on a platform that has adds on it, does this not also contribute to a “commercial purpose”?
A: Well, that is difficult to answer. There a different ways of “commercial” use: The easiest is you sell the content. Or you have access to some kind of payment because you produce it. But if someone leaves you a tip in a jar, or a non profit site gets donations because of the value it creates, it is not commercial use.
Then there are more difficult cases: Content is hosted on a site with an advertisement, for example. Some people including me do not consider it commercial use. But it is a hard question, and you really only can solve it case by case by understanding the community development.
Q: Yochai Benkler says that participatory communication lead as to a “more critical and self-reflective culture. In which way is this also true for a society that maintains strict copyrights on intellectual property?
A: The choice about intellectual property regimes is always a choice about content being concentrated or diffused. How we currently run it results in only one thing: Only the big players can use it because they have lawyers who figure out copyright themes. Copyright is to produce incentives to produce things – any other use to me is objected by the first amendment.
Q: What’s really new about crowdsourcing? And where is it going next?
A: I can’t tell you where it is going to be next…I think it is just the scale that is new, from beginning of time people have been working on projects, sharing ideas. The internet enables us to do it on a much wider range. The question is whether this dynamic is to be preserved
Q: Do you really think there’s wisdom in crowds?
It really depends on the case – I could talk another thirty minutes about it. In lots of contexts crowds can produce information, create great things together. But I do not know whether there is a general wisdom in crowds – because it is not always the case that deliberation promotes understanding.
