There’s a nice quote by Jeff Tweedy (leader of the band Wilco) in Lessig’s column in last month’s Wired:

“Music,” he explained, “is different” from other intellectual property. Not Karl Marx different – this isn’t latent communism. But neither is it just “a piece of plastic or a loaf of bread.” The artist controls just part of the music-making process; the audience adds the rest. Fans’ imagination makes it real. Their participation makes it live. “We are just troubadours,” Tweedy told me. “The audience is our collaborator. We should be encouraging their collaboration, not treating them like thieves.”

It’s similar to something I’ve been mulling over for a while now about art in general. Art isn’t created out of nothing. It’s inspired by culture, augmented by technology, given its own voice by the audience, advertised by word of mouth and filtered by fans. The artist steers these forces, but they’re created by a cast of millions.

Why do we credit the violinist and the composer of a piece but not the master luthier who made the violin? Did his artistry contribute any less to the beauty of the music?

Lawrence Lessig has just sworn off publishing “in any academic journal that does not permit [him] the freedoms of at least a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.”

Accademic journals are funny economic actors, because it’s very clear they provide publication, archival and authentication services to an academic community, but not the content. The community that eventually reads the journal also provides the real value in a journal: its authors, reviewers and editors, usually for free or a pittance. While there’s no denying that publication and archival services cost money and should be compensated, high subscription prices or other access restrictions are a disservice to the entire author-reader community. As the main provider of value in the process this community has considerable power. It’s more pronounced in accademia, but I see a lot of similarity to the growing pains the record industry is feeling, with consumers and artists both realizing the value added by the middleman isn’t as valuable as they thought. I suspect these fights in academia contain some good lessons for how the powershifts will other content areas might play out — assuming financial interests in the old way things were done don’t manage to put the djinni back in the bottle.

Side note: the two academic societies in my field, IEEE and ACM, both require that an author sign over his or her copyright to them before publication. Both policies have become more open in the past decade, in particular by granting permission for articles to be published on the author’s own website, but Lessig’s oath would still rule out either society’s journals because they don’t grant permission to others. ACM lays out its rationale for its copyright program, and concludes: ACM firmly believes that it achieves a balance among divergent goals; that its use of copyright within its publishing program in fact serves the public good by enabling the creation and widespread dissemination of quality works in various formats and media. This may be the case right now, but with media technology changing so quickly I suspect (and hope) author-reader pressure will continue to push these policies towards more openness.

I finally watched/listened to Wizard People, Dear Readers last night, Brad Neely’s unauthorized alternative narration to the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone movie. It’s synched to the movie — turn the sound on your DVD low (so you still hear the music) and hit play on both at the same time. The style is less MST3K and more like hearing a narration of the movie by an earnest but clueless poet-turned-subtitle-writer. It’s also surprisingly funny.

The film/soundtrack has been out for almost a year, but according to Stay Free! Daily Warner Brothers has just recently started strong-arming theaters to cancel screenings, threatening to cut off all ties with venues that show it. Presumably they’re threatening boycott instead of copyright suit because, as a parody, WPDR is probably but not certainly legal — and they’d rather keep that uncertainty if possible. Why they’re actively trying to stifle something that makes them money though is a little of a mystery — after all, you can’t watch WPDR without purchasing the film rights for Harry Potter (in my case, a whopping $14.99 for the DVD just to watch it with the sound turned off!). I’ve no great insight into the minds of Warner Brothers, but I can imagine three possible reasons they want to crush this movement, ranked in order of likelihood:

1. Studios make their box-office money on new releases, not so much second-run. The more fans make their own stuff based on old works the less oxygen (movie-goer attention, theater time, press, etc.) will go to their new releases. This is just a way to kill off another potential competing genre while it’s still in its infancy.
2. As one of the winners in the “old media” model, WB executives fear change. They figure it’s better to shut down anything new than to see if it might actually make them more money in the long run.
3. Maybe J.K. Rowling or some other important person made a fuss?

The Menlo Park startup Peerflix has been getting some ink the past couple days. They’re like NetFlix, only instead of renting a DVD for an indefinite time you trade DVDs with other members. Peerflix has no inventory, they provide the matchmaking service, mailing labels and points system that works like barter cash, all for a 99-cent per trade fee. You own the DVD you trade for, free and clear — and legal.

It’s models like this that bring home for me again why it was so important for the music distribution cartel to crush MP3.com’s Beam-It service and, more directly, why they’re sure to fight any possible emergence of a used digital-music market.

The Berkeman Center’s white paper on iTunes has a good discussion of the Digital First Sale doctrine (starting around page 51), and concludes people probably don’t have the right to resell used digital media (just the bits) like they do tangible things like books or CDs. But imagine for a moment that we did, and that things like the DMCA, draconian EULAs, and the RIAA shock troops didn’t get in the way. Now imagine a frictionless Peerflix, (or better yet a Peertunes) and that it’s hooked into your music player, so when you click on a song it automatically sells the song to you (locking anyone else out from playing it), plays it, and three minutes later it gets sold back to the digital lending library again. A whole town could share a single music collection; the less-popular music could be shared by a whole country. And it’d all be legal.

I can already hear all the usual clamoring from the cartel about how this sort of thing would bring down the music industry, destroy artist incentives, yadda yadda. The funny thing is, I don’t think it would — those are the exact same things that copyright owners whined about when faced with the creation of the library, used bookstores and the VCR.