Mashup Culture Strangled in the Crib?

if:book told us about Lawrence Lessig’s closing keynote to the Open Source Business Conference earlier this week, summarized on the OSBC website thus: “What the technologists gave, the law is taking away. Source code, entertainment, telecommunications—we live in a world where so-called rights-holders are increasingly exercising those rights to the detriment of consumers, competitors and, unwittingly, to themselves.”

The Internetnews.com field report expands on that premise a bit, discussing how Lessig distinguishes between a “read/write Internet” which sounds rather like various ‘Netopian’ visions from the early ’90s onward (raise your hands if you can remember when HTML was going to create millions of new media outlets, and every man and woman was going to be their own news agency) and the “read-only Internet” he sees emerging, “supported by copyright law to perfectly control how people get access” to music, videos, books and other IP, as well as what they can do with that IP once it’s in their possession.

As Ben Vershbow at if:book puts it, “[Corporations] want the right to shape the flow of culture to best fit their ideal architecture of revenue. You can see, then, how if they had it their way, the internet would come to look much more like an on-demand broadcast service than the vibrant two-way medium we have today: simply because it’s easier to make money from read-only than from read/write—from broadcast than from public access.”

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