With regards to copyright, watch this TED video from last year in which Lawrence Lessig, a well-known expert on copyright issues, explains his vision for reconciling creative freedom with marketplace competition.

I attended a really interesting panel last week at Tribeca called Reuse Remix Renew – covering copyright and digital culture in advance of the release of the Tribeca Institute’s Sample This! licensing toolkit for filmmakers which should be available later this Summer. The panel included DJ Spooky – aka Paul D. Miller, That Subliminal Kid, who has recently released a book he has edited called Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. He said that his 1996 album Songs of a Dead Dreamer would probably not be released today because litigation against sampling has become so much more robust. Spooky thinks of this work as an “invisible sculpture made of fragments of history” and the battles over copyright come down to “who owns memory?” for him. He talked about how the old model of copyright is based on scarcity but now culture is “ubiquitous, downloadable, everywhere, all the time” and smart folk, like Google, are tapping into this new model and making millions. He went on to talk about the bootleg economy that is dominant in many countries in the world and to note that the way that the law is currently written and the way that we actually live are parting ways. We are moving toward a gift economy and people are having to work out how to monetize this in new ways. Digital literacy will be a big deal as we move forward in this new world.

Eric Steuer, creative director of Creative Commons, is one of the people working to increase digital literacy and explore new ways of allowing legal reuse, remixing and sharing of creative work. “People are going to engage with things they love,” he said “so you have to create business models that accept this and work around it. People are not going to stop downloading but they respect the flexibility of Creative Commons.”

Jennifer Urban and Himanshu Singh from the USC Intellectual and Technology Law Clinic are working with the Tribeca Film Insitute to develop the Sample This! toolkit. Clinics like theirs help filmmakers with issues over fair use and the toolkit came out of this work.

Himanshu Singh, Eric Steur, Paul D. Miller, Jennifer Urban and moderator Georg Szalai from The Hollywood Reporter.

While I was thinking about fair use, sampling and copyright I re-discovered this awesome performance by Jamie Lidell so I’m embedding it here for some extra sample-tastic pleasure.

Tamsin

SP London

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We will be posting more on this soon but in the meantime check out the film itself.

Watch the first part of Steal This Film and post your comments.

Some useful resources for those willing to wade into these shark infested waters are the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, the brainchild of Lawrence Lessig, the Center for Social Media, the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the US and The Open Rights Group in the UK, and Cory Doctorow (co-editor of Boing Boing) who is particularly eloquent on the problems with DRM. And of course Creative Commons - allowing content creators to decide which rights are reserved.

UPDATE: Check out the Steal This Film podcast from BRITDOC 07 here.