Another in the generally excellent series of TED talks, this time with Lessig in fine form on his favorite subject of how horribly broken our current approaches to copyright are. One of his repeated points that rings very true for the father of a 13 year is the role that (digital) remixes play in their lives. It’s what they watch, and it’s what they make. Sub-Evil doesn’t take snapshots and write letters to his friends back home. He takes photos and video at school, remixes them, and posts them to YouTube for his friends (here and there) to watch. He takes photos his Morris friends post on Facebook, remixes them, and then posts them back to Facebook. This is how he connects and communicates with his peer groups. Quite a change from his old man’s experiences 30 years ago, but that doesn’t make it any less true, despite all the inane business, legal, and legislative decisions that try to ignore that reality.
You can’t kill the instinct the technology produces, we can only criminalize it. We can’t stop our kids from using it, we can only drive it underground. … Ordinary people live life against the law … [our kids] live life knowing they live it against the law. That realization is extraordinarily corrosive, extraordinarily corrupting, and in a democracy we ought to be able to do better…
Amen, brother.