Lawrence Lessig is a strong advocate for major copyright law reform. He recognizes that with the evolution and development of the Internet that the current system to regulate copyright violations is consequently out of date and needs a major overhaul. Lessig argues that every time you create something in the digital context, the technology is making a digital copy. Therefore amateur use of digital technology cannot be nearly as regulated as it was once before with what was previously extended to only professional use. Perhaps the point in the book he is trying to get across the most is that the government and law-makers need to embrace what Lessig calls the Read/Write culture as opposed to the old-fashioned Read-Only culture. RO culture limits the role of the consumer to just that, 'consuming'. Examples of such forms of this culture would be the traditional media such as newspapers, books, and magazines. Read/Write culture on the other hand is a culture where the public is free to add, change, influence, and interact with their culture. As opposed to RO culture, amateur producers make and distribute the content. Lessig argues that Read/Write culture will nurture creativity by all individuals to produce and influence their culture. By having the public take part as participants and add their own input in to a culture, the end result will be a richer culture that can provide significant social benefits. Unfortunately, the copyright laws that soon followed the upbringing of the Read/Write culture changed the dynamics of the culture itself. The government and copyright regulators seemed to try to scare the public into leaving the responsibility of production to the professionals, therefore hindering the public from any kind of creativity.
Lessig’s book seems to be more of a call to action, urging the readers of the book to help him seek out a solution to this out-of-control copyright law situation. Lessig believes that surely a middle ground can be reached where there could be a new way to share work where, at the same time, the government can not come down so hard on people seemingly who break the law. Every one can agree that clamping down on file sharing has been a huge waste of resources for the past decade. There was case once of a 32-year-old, mother-of-four, from Minnesota who was sued $1.92 million dollars by the Recording Industry Association of America for downloading 24 songs from the Internet. The RIAA had sued the woman for $80,000 per song downloaded. In another case, the RIAA even sued a 12-year-old girl for downloading music illegally, threatening to sue up to $130,000 per song downloaded. The mother of the girl had even paid a $30 monthly service fee for the music sharing service and didn’t realize they had done anything wrong. These two individuals are just a few out of only hundreds who had been sued for millions. It’s situations like these that convince Lessig that surely there’s a better way to handle copyright violations in the music industry. These extreme legal crackdowns have barely stopped individuals from downloading and swapping music over the Internet. One could argue that rather than the corporations spending excessive time and money on criminalizing individuals on downloading music they should instead be working on ways to remodel the system for file sharing so that everyone isn’t a criminal.
I believe the middle ground Lessig is looking for is in the website, grooveshark.com Grooveshark is an online music search engine, music streaming service, and music recommendation application that allows users to search for, stream, and upload music for a monthly fee of $6/month or $60/year. Grooveshark is different from controversial p2p sites such as Napster, Kazaa, and Morpheus because music is streamed from the Internet rather than downloaded to a user’s hard drive. This technology is what is called “cloud” storage technology and is quickly becoming utilized frequently in many sites these days. Users can even create their own personalized playlists and share them with other users online. Grooveshark also utilized the web software used with Pandora Radio to find music suited to your tastes. The site is very interactive and is completely user-operated since the entire music database is formed by a huge collection of shared music files. Grooveshark is funded by both user fees and advertising space on their site. The result of the amount of users Grooveshark has drawn has created the most diverse selection of music on the web for others to stream. Though as popular has Grooveshark has become there are a few gray areas that have risen up. Record labels EMI and Universal have both attempted to sue Grooveshark for having illegal copies of songs not permitted to be released by the label.
In chapter nine of Remix, Lessig recommends some reforms that could be put in to practice that could ultimately reshape the structure of copyright law for the greater good of society. I believe that a few of these could actually benefit the website, grooveshark.com. One of these reforms Lessig recommends is the practice of what he calls “Decriminalizing the Copy”. Lessig argues that lawmakers shouldn’t just regulate the creation of copies, which as mentioned before is an impossible task. Rather the use of copies for commercial use is what should be regulated extensively. Lessig reminds the reader that for most of our history copyright law didn’t actually regulate copies. From 1790 until 1909, the law regulated different uses that were directly linked to the commercial exploitation of creative work. Obviously if one were to rip a copy of an album and sell it for their own financial gain, then that should be illegal and should be enforced. Music streaming websites such as Grooveshark should essentially be treated as any other broadcast radio station. After all, it’s not illegal for one to listen to a song broadcasted over the radio into one’s car radio sound system. The only issue that is missing from this comparison is that artists are not compensated for the number of times their songs are streamed by users. This is another reform recommended by Lessig in what he calls “Decriminalizing File Sharing”. Lessig thinks that Congress needs to decriminalize file sharing by either authorizing at least noncommercial file sharing with taxes to cover a reasonable royalty to the artists whose work is shared, or by authorizing a simple blanket licensing procedure where users would pay a low fee to buy the right to file share freely. Grooveshark already enforces a user fee to create personalized playlists. It would only be fair to not only share the user fees with artists but share advertising revenue with the artists as well. This way the artists could be compensated for the number of plays a song has similar to how songwriters are compensated for how many “spins” they get on broadcast radio. By utilizing these reforms recommended by Lessig, Grooveshark could not only avoid lawsuits from major record labels but also benefit financially for becoming a legitimate, completely legal, form of music sharing between online users. This seems to be a reasonable solution to the out-dated copyright law system that Lessig is striving for, which could mean fair regulations for music consumption in the digital age.
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