It's the Hybrid Economy, Stupid!

Two questions I'd like to pose about the Lessig reading are:

1) Is the vast majority of remixing just pure crap and a waste of time? (91-7)

Lessig's answer is both a "yes" and "no," for several reasons, and I'm not quite clear whether he's advocating for both answers.

One of my thoughts is that "yes," a lot of remixes are a waste of time--but not necessarily on the part of amateur creators. I cite J.J. Abram's Star Trek as an example, as well as the Scary Movie parody series; Star Trek alienated many fans, and showed little imagination in the storyline (big bad Reman comes to destroy the Federation with a planet-killing ship--wasn't that the premise for the last failed Star Trek film?), and the Scary Movie franchise is unabashedly hackneyed in its mockery of classic horror films through common-denominator stereotypes (the weed-smoking black man, the virginal starlet, the rapist gay guy, etc.). Both are professional remixes, and both have strong arguments for why they're utter crap.

But there are other remixes, both professional and amateur, that are arguably better than the original. For example, the 1998 film Go featured a remix of Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride" that seems better to me than the original. Listen to them both, and see if you agree: original and remix. I rarely hear the original except in soundtracks, yet I've listened to the remix at least once a week for the past ten years.

So I tend to think of remixes in the same way I think of "originals": on a case-by-case basis. The best example of this, I think are the "Talent Show" programs that invite people to sing or dance or otherwise try to get famous; American Idol is pure crap to me, but there are some folks out there who practically worship Clay Aiken (and are actually over the age of 13!). And I'm not going to watch the British version, but I have to admit that Susan Boyle is an excellent singer (and that's about as far as I'm willing to discuss her). Of course, what these examples have in common is that they're all working off original content, sung or presented in a new way.


2) Are hybrid economies sustainable?

One of Lessig's examples of a hybrid economy is craigslist. According to Newmark (189), the site is paid for by job and apartment listings in major cities (where a posting fee is required), but anyone who's turned on their television, opened a paper, or had their fingers in the vicinity of the pulse of the mainstream news could tell you, craigslist also runs an "adult services" or "erotic services" category that also charges a posting fee (I guess that could be a job listing, but that's not where I'd go looking for the category if I was interested). Of course, all the negative press has forced craigslist to shut down this revenue source, but that's my point: how many more categories must now charge a posting fee in order to keep the service afloat? I've got no figures for how much income craigslist pulled in from the now-censored category, but I can hazard a guess that it was at least equivalent to the revenue from NYC apartment listings (although I may, in all likelihood, be lowballing that figure, if you'll pardon the pun).

This is just one example, but I've gotta ask: are these hybrid economies going to last, or will they end up as the next Pets.com?

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Finally, I think Lessig is right in valuing the creativity of remixes, and in laying out a case for the update of copyright laws. I'm among the generation who view remixes as new creative arts, even though I absolutely hate the autotuner (it makes singers out of the tone-deaf, and it sounds like shit to me. I blame Cher). I don't think that children (and adults) should be criminalized in the way they are now, or that universities should become de facto policemen for the RIAA. Having been an (innocent) victim of WSU's war on file-sharing, I certainly don't see it as the role of 20yo kids in the IT building to enforce copyright law.

[The story, as I'm sure everyone wants to hear it now, is rather uninteresting: in 2004, my university network account was suspended for suspected file-sharing activities due to a large amount of up-bandwidth (uploads to other people) usage, across different countries and even continents. This looks like illegal file-sharing, as one might question why I'd upload 50mb worth of data to someone in Sweden while downloading another 20mb from someone in Toronto. And it was file-sharing: I was participating in the World of Warcraft beta, and downloading the game client using Blizzard's downloader. Blizzard's downloader uses bit torrent technology (file-sharing); the idea is that if I download 50% or more of the client from other people, Blizzard's bandwidth won't get overused, and downloads will be optimal for everyone. However, the IT guys declared it a violation of the university's network use policy, and I had to attend a workshop on copyright law where the university's copyright protection lawyer lectured to me that I was hurting Eminem by downloading music illegally. It's one of the very few occasions where I've gotten in an argument with a university administrator so heated that he called me a "thieving shitrag."]

I think Lessig has some good ideas for reforming copyright law in a way that benefits everyone. However, I don't think it's gonna happen. On the internet, individual people may have power and authority, but in the halls of Congress the RIAA and other interested lobbyists write the law. Even Lessig admitted, in the video we watched Thursday, that going to the government was a failed idea. So the law ain't gonna change in any way that favors remixers, and will likely only go further towards increasing the power of the individual (or, rather, corporate) owner of a copyright. And, IMHO, this will continue until the current system reaches such a crisis that the recording, film, and publishing industries will crumble, and something else will take its place. Lessig, being a lawyer, thinks that it will be replaced by the Creative Commons license. But I think it will be replaced by an ethic of no-copyright (I'm one of the extremists that Lessig mentioned); like marijuana and speeding laws, I think that copyright laws will be largely ignored by amateur culture, though increasingly punished by professional culture (as it implodes). The incentive to publish or create remixes, professionally, will also suffer; why try to sell an amateur remix when it costs $40,000 for licensing rights? So, I see a crisis coming, and I don't see traditional copyright surviving; but I also don't see it being reformed through the law (I think Lessig's main weakness is that he's a law professor, and therefore has far too much faith in the law).