The Scholar’s Space

Copyright in a sound bite? No. But remix in a sound bite? Absolutely. Lessig makes his point about the value of Remix by putting his and Colbert’s money where Lessig’s mouth is. Bite on this. Lessig shows the original clip of his interview on The Colbert Report, about 6 minutes (a bit painful to watch him up against a comedian), then links to a few of the first remixes. It only takes listening to or watching a couple to fully get it. This is so cool and fun and this is what all the fuss is about! What these folks have done would have been illegal without the permission Lessig orally provided, authorizing remixes of his interview (and later affixing a CC-BY license to the clip). Colbert eloquently states the party line: No one should ever remix my stuff unless I say so.

Of course there are lots more remixes. Lessig links to and discusses them at another of his blog posts. Do go check them out. You won’t need to read the book. Just kidding. The book is a great read. Read it!

I finished it a few days ago and sure enough, he makes 5 specific recommendations for how Congress could modify the law to stop the failed war on file sharing. But he also points out that CC licenses implement 4 of the 5 policies independently of Congressional action …

Congress could act. Congress should act. Congress may never act. I’m so tempted to say “so what” here, but Jamie Boyle’s faith in our ability to make the case keeps me from it. CC licenses require us, one at a time, to take a stand in favor of a more reasonable scope for the law. Congress could bring about the more reasonable scope in one fell swoop. I won’t hold my breath, but I won’t give up either, not so long as Jamie Boyle and Larry Lessig still think there’s reason to believe it’s possible. Either way, the market in remixes is going for it.

The latest edition of Peter Suber’s Open Access Newsletter includes a roundup of great news from 2008. There’s so much good news to report that he must say up front that he’s been selective, left out some things, and organized what he has into nine categories. And it is a lot to read. But it is so inspiring! It’s just what I needed to feel hopeful for 2009, that the momentum will carry forward.

Several of the items that were news to me were really surprising as well. Top among the surprises was this paragraph under heading 8, Books:

There were new OA textbook publishing initiatives from Flat World Knowledge, the Open University of Israel, and the Community College Open Textbook Project.  Florida became the first state in the US to approve an OA textbook program for use in its public schools.  The MakeTextbooksAffordable campaign released the Open Textbooks Statement to Make Textbooks Affordable, with signatures of 1,000+ professors from 300+ colleges in all 50 states.  StudentPIRGs launched a sign-on “Statement of Intent” for faculty to show their support for OA textbooks.  It also published a report recommending OA textbooks and criticizing TA digital textbooks for high prices, hobbling DRM, printing restrictions, and automatic expiration.

Having been a graduate student for the last 2 1/2 years and having used quite a few analog and digital textbooks, I see this industry as *way, way behind the curve* unable to take serious advantage of the digital networked environment. And I’ve heard that the negotiations with publishers to offer their texts in more innovative and more useful ways often fall flat if the publisher can’t be assured of making more money from the new model than he already makes from his existing strategy. Talk about innovator’s dilemma. This sets the stage perfectly for the upstarts who are willing to try new things because they don’t already have preconceived ideas about what they *ought* to be making right now from their existing customers. Have none of these folks read Christensen’s book, Innovator’s Dilemma? Their industry is positioned classically as the losing trajectory in the chart to the left. It shows how new technologies at first fail miserably to meet the needs of a firm’s current customers. Though their performance qualities fall so far below what current customers expect even at the low end of the market, they eventually improve through the process of sustaining innovation until they “break through” into the up-scale markets, directly competing with established firms for the same customers. Christensen documents this pattern in industry after industry. Publishing in general is following the pattern — like a puppy dog. Sad to see, but it’s frustrating as well.