Lessig and the Remix Generation

Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford University and known for his various writings, politically outspokeness on issues dealing with Copyright Law provides a background for his research in his book “Remix”.  Lessigs belief is that Copyright Law in its current state does nothing more than stifle creativity of future artists and follows the misguided premise that attacks children who access illegal content over the internet though peer to peer networks.  Although this is a very quick summary of Lessig argument he does choose to go into detail about where the flawed Copyright ideology that society has come to accept and purport has arisen.Lessig speaks first about an American Composer by the name of John Philip Sousa who sought to recieve conpensation for his musical creations who were recently being played without his permission by the invention of player pianos. Lessig records Sousas argument for the protection of copyrighted content by stating the idea that once people are freely able to access content at any time they the consumer will lose the ability to generate their own content. This is a very similar to an argument made by Aristotle that the creation of the written world will eventually destroy the human memory because they will no longer need to memorize vast amounts of information.This eventually leads to the idea of a Read Only culture  versus a Read-Write culture.  In a Read Only culture, the society which Sousa would argue we as human beings are moving towards, the creators of content are a select few and nearly everyone else is seen as a consumer. The consumer in a Read Only Culture is only able to create content from others generated content and looses the innate ability to make use of tools from the past. An example of this would be contemporary music. Lessig speaks about a band by the name of Girl-Talk who specialize in the creation of music that utilizes components of other artists music but places different artists components into the same song. This is an example of creativity that Lessig believes is being stifled by currently pro copyright legislation. In the RW culture that supports creativity however everyone is seen as beingn a creator of content, although when comparing the two one can generally see Lessig’s argument.