I’m familiar with Larry Lessig’s work, and have read his books, but I’ve never heard him speak before; so I was looking forward to his keynote talk with great anticipation. But I have to admit that I failed utterly to listen, comprehend, summarize, and present a coherent analysis of what he said. Part of the problem was that he talked so fast that I could barely keep up with him, especially since I was desperately trying to type as much of the verbatim material as possible; and part of it was that the intellectual content of his presentation was so thought-provoking that I simply couldn’t absorb and digest what he was communicating in any kind of real-time fashion.

Fortunately, all is not lost, for there’s an audio (MP3) and video (QuickTime) version of his presentation; this is, after all, the Wikimania conference that strives to provide all forms of human knowledge to society in as free and unfettered a fashion as possible. But the downside is that I’m not able to provide the “value-added” that I would normally want to provide on a blog like this — i.e., summarizing, abstracting, and synthesizing his presentation so you could be freed from the time-consuming burden of having to listen to the presentation yourself. I will try to distill a few salient points and pearls of wisdom for you to browse through before you click onto some other part of the Internet. But if you really want to understand the details of Lessig’s thesis on the “ethics of the free culture movement” — the title of his presentation — you’ll have to listen to it, or watch it, for yourself. Sorry about that, but c’est la vie.

If it’s any consolation, you’ll find that Lessig is an excellent speaker; in the past, I’ve spared a number of blog/website readers the onerous task of listening to mind-numbingly boring presentations by people who actually had something important to say, but who simply didn’t know how to present their message without putting their audience sound asleep. You don’t have to worry about that with Lessig: he’s a delight to listen to, fun to watch (it’s not vaudeville or a French can-can dance, but hey, this is computer stuff; whaddya want, after all?). He started off his presentation by wryly observing that Wikimania 2006 was similar to Woodstock (which took place, I might point out, when he was 8 years old); it was raining outside, as it was for at least part of Woodstock, and Lessig theorized that several babies had already been made during the conference. (If so, I certainly didn’t see any evidence of it!)

Well, okay, so what was the talk all about? If I had to boil it down to one thing, it was Lessig’s argument that the 19th and 20th century — i.e., the height of the Industrial Age, and the first 50 years of the Information Age — were an aberration, and that the 21st century has begun shifting things back to the way they were before the Industrial Age (toward the end of his talk, he noted that author and former TV news anchorman Tom Brokaw had written an homage to the our parents’ World War II generation, referring to them as The Greatest Generation, but that we shouldn’t forget that they did their heroic deeds during what will eventually be remembered as the weirdest century). The Industrial Age was not an aberration in terms of incomes, or prosperity, obviously, but in terms of something that Lessig considers much more imporant: a “read-only” (RO) society, versus a “read-write” (RW) society. But his warning to the audience was that the Wiki-style promise of a RW society is threatened, and under attack by the big-media, big-corporate copyright-oriented interests of the old RO culture. His concern is that, unless we recognize the nature of the battle and mount a vigorous defense, we may lose this battle, and find ourselves to the whims of the corporate publishers and media companies for many years to come.

I haven’t thought about this very much, and I haven’t tried to independently confirm what Lessig said in his talk today, but it makes sense: before the Industrial Revolution, much of what we consider “knowledge” could only be captured and preserved, transmitted and passed on to future generations by a collaborative, verbal mechanism: as such, it was a read-write (RW) mechanism, in the sense that generation N+1 could replicate (with some inevitable loss of information content) what they heard from their generation-N elders, but also improvise, enhance, and improve that information for the benefit of their generation N+2 children. But in such a culture, the notion of “copyrights” and “intellectual property” basically didn’t exist.

All of this changed, Lessig argued, with the 19th-20th century technologies that allowed and emphasized the importance of intellectual creations (e.g., the design of a textile factory), the recording and documentation of such intellectual creations, and the legal protections associated with such creations — e.g., patents and copyrights. But what I found interesting about Lessig’s presentation was his argument that it wasn’t just an evolution in the business community, but also an evolution in politics: in the U.S., for example, he argues that the early versions of the Republican Party championed a RW “Free Labor” movement, but that it was replaced by a technology-based “RO” movement that favored the people in charge of factories. There’s a lot more to this, but I’m not sure my notes are accurate, and you’re better off listening to, and/or watching, the actual words of Lessig’s audio-visual presentation.

Well, all of that is a prelude to our current situation. Lessig argues that there are two very different cultures created by the Internet: a very efficient RO mechanism that facilitates the buying and selling of culture anytime and anywhere, if it was created elsewhere. The poster child for this kind of mechanism, he argues, is Apple’s iTunes, which provides convenient, inexpensive access to millions of songs, and now thousands of videos and movies — but only on an iPod, and only within the restrictions of Apple’s copy-protection constraints.

But at the same time, a rich, vibrant, and rapidly growing RW culture is being created with examples like Flickr, MySpace, and a whole genre of “anime music videos” (AMV), which I had never heard of before Lessig’s presentation; of course, there’s a Wikipedia article on the subject, so you can find out what all the fuss is about. There’s an AMV web site devoted to this form of culture, and there are also (as of the date/time when I’m writing this), some 14,785 AMV video clips on YouTube.

Lessig’s point is that universally available audio/video/graphic/Internet tools are democratizing creativity, and that today’s creativity is no longer predominately expressed in written form; “writing words is the Latin of our time,” Lessig says. The “vulgar (popular) language” of today is video and remixes. Some of it, I have to admit, is pretty hilarious; if you’re not easily offended by religious satire, take a look at “Jesus Christ: the Musical.” And Lessig noted that these creations are not limited to music, cartoons, or things created in the U.S.; here’s a political satire titled “Bush and Blair Love Song,” from a Swedish website.

All too often, this wildly popular RW culture involves copying — copying music, copying video and movie clips, copying code, copying photographs — and as a result, the RW culture is engaged in a war against the RO culture, whose business model is threatened by copying, and which threatens to shut it down. Lessig says that his first instinct, given his training and background as a lawyer, was to “litigate” against the RO culture; but he changed his views after serving as lead counsel for the plaintiff in the Eldred v. Ashcroft case before the Supreme Court, and losing by a vote of 7-2. That case challenged the constitutionality of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), which extended the duration of copyrights to either 95 years, or the life of the author, plus 70 years — the practical result of which was that works published on or after 1923, which would have entered the public domain in 1998, retained their copyright.

After losing this case, Lessig says he shifted his battle to “private means,” which he continues today. He argues that there are two critical “private steps” we need, in order to preserve publicly-available materials and thus enable the RW culture. The first is for individuals — and especially those who create artistic works of any kind — to practice a free culture — e.g., by using the Creative Commons (CC) licensing mechanism rather than traditional copyrights. And second, we need to enable free culture: we need to make it possible in schools, universities, and public places everywhere. This, he says, is what Wikipedia is all about; and it’s what open-source products like Linux are all about.

Lessig spent the remainder of his talk explaining the mechanisms of the CC, and arguing that interoperability and useable platforms (e.g., hardware, Web browsers, operating systems, API’s, etc.) are crucial for enabling a a vibrant RW culture of freely distributable intellectual content.

My notes don’t reflect how he made the segue to his final comments, but he quoted one of the important Internet pioneers, David D. Clark, who said, ” We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.”

All in all, it was a thoroughly delightful and thought-provoking presentation. I urge you to share the enjoyment by watching the QuickTime video clip; you’ll find it well worth your while.