Sunday, March 27, 2011

blog post 9. Catching up

First, describe what you see as Lessig's key argument in the Introduction. Second, describe the difference RW and RO culture and why it matters to Lessig's argument. Third, why does Lessig use Sousa?

Lessig's introduction, I believe, is meant to spur a debate within the reader as to what ownership is, what art is, and what exactly the current climate of copyright law is. It sets up several different cases in which ownership of particular things is used as protection from use from others, and how those cases can be ridiculous. Lessig's key argument here is that we need to rethink how we view originality, ownership, art, and the laws that hold them together if we are to save not only the content industry but the way that people view remixing in general.

RW (read/write) culture differs from RO (read/only)in that one is a passive way of consumption, and the other is a way to create new things. We use to live in a time when RO was all that was really feasible, so people scheduled their lives for their daily intake of cultural consumption. Today however, technology allows us to 'write' after 'reading' almost anything we want. Lessig argues that this is a natural way for creating new things, we are learning from the past to create something unseen before, through mixing.

Sousa is Lessig's marker for the coming of a RO culture. Sousa argued against using machines that could reproduce sound, pushing for harsher copyright law. Sousa feared that people would receive a less democratic culture if they were only reading and not writing. Lessig is enjoying using Sousa as a heralder of the return of RW culture.

1 comment:

  1. This post is ok, but needs a bit more attention to the reading (it's one of those posts you could've just gleaned enough from class to write). Some direct references to, or examples from, the text would've helped. That being said, I'm glad you caught up :)

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