Melancholy Elephant, Spider Robinson and Lawrence Lessig
Sadie at Extremely Graphic blog has really gotten me thinking about creativity and copyright issues. I’m beginning to be a Lawrence Lessig fan, and when I saw him on the Colbert Report recently I became intrigued again with our antiquated thinking about copyright and artistic expression. In promoting his new book Remix (which I have already mentioned on this blog), by the way there are remixes of the interview everywhere on youtube.
Here is a YouTube of Lessig….
Lessig’s blog provides all kinds of discussion on this topic including interviews, and lectures of Lessig explaining his views on copyright and creative collaboration.
Spider Robinson, in 1983 wrote a short story called Melancholy Elephants that addresses what Sadie and Lim, the Vidder are talking about. Thanks to his use of the Creative Commons you can read the story for yourself.
So maybe it’s time to re-think art, re-think copyright, use collaboration more and explore what all these issues mean to us and do they create unnecessary limitations on creative expression when everyone is worried about violating copyright. And is art finite? Are there any cheerful elephants?
Book Wars, or the one who sells the most wins, and the Re-mix is on
I like listening for book news on the television, it always surprises me what comes up. Apparently Ann Coulter and Bill O’ Reilly got into an argument about who sells the most books. It was a sibling type disagreement more along the lines, “Mom likes me better”, ”NO she likes me better”.
Ann is hitting the talk circuit with her new book, Guilty. She told O’ Reilly when he suggested she take some advice from another conservative, Bernie Goldberg, ”my general policy is to take advice from people who sell more books than me not fewer books…”. Then O’ Reilly said something along the line of you should take my advice since I sell more than you. Then the following: no you don’t; yes I do; no you don’t ; yes I do, etc.
Interesting, since if that were true she’d be taking most of her advice from J. K. Rowling.
My take on this whole silly political book business, that make the rounds on the talk show circuit, both conservative and liberal, is that it results in additional money in the pockets of the bookseller and publisher. If this is what it takes to support an industry to keep us in books worth reading then I’m fine with it. Keep selling, keep publishing, keep arguing about who sells the most and keep giving me the choice of what I want to read.
Then on the Colbert Report, Lawrence Lessig, was interviewed (or harassed) by Colbert about his new book, Remix. Since copyright issues are something that drive librarians up the wall, this is a particularly sore subject with me as well. Of course all talk of copyright is best left our of social dialogue or you will not be asked back to any parties. 
But if you go to Lessig’s Blog, you can hear a fascinating remix of his interview. It’s on the January 9th entry.
