Good Copy Bad Copy

Good Copy Bad Copy is a documentary worth checking out-- "a documentary about the current state of copyright and culture." (Denmark, 2007).
Lawrence Lessig says,

[For us, over 40,] the idea of actually doing something with it is alien to us. But our kids look at media as just inputs to their own creativity. The United States PEW did a study that 57% of teenagers had created and shared content on the internet. That's not people peer-to-peer file-sharing (that's about 99%) [he laughs]. But this is people actually creating material and making it available. For us, the couch potato generation, it's bizarre. But for them, it's the natural way to understand and to create.

Now, you can call them criminals, call them pirates-- use all the tools of law and technology to block that creativity-- or we can begin to encourage them by making a wide-range of materials available, that gave them a much better understanding of their past and a much better opportunity to say something about the future.

Am impressed, not just with Lessig's well-known eloquence on the side of free information culture, but with how grounded he remains. Listen to him, jesus. His mild-mannered presentation makes such a perfect conduit for the revolutionary, counter-culture, redactive-copyright ideas he shares. (be grateful selfish home-grown downloader. so much better than having a michael moore for free culture, you know?)

"Who really owns what? And what is the purpose of copyright?" Well put, by the suited man with the piano prop (followed by the image of a dancing girl shaking her 'milkshakes'? very balanced production). "Get off your ass and jam." Well put.

[Watch out, the player reloads with new chapters, you can't preview the whole length and it's longer than you think.]

"There's no one who disagrees that reading and writing are key tools and skills that we must have if we're going to engage in our economy and in our society and in our social relationships. What we're now beginning to understand is that writing and reading and learning and literacy are being added to by new forms of literacy that are equally important. Visual literacy, a literacy in moving images, and a literacy in audio as well, are increasing in importance.

We're expecting people to operate in a world that's dominated by images and moving images, and we're expecting them to have a critical analysis and attitude to the organizations that provide those moving images, and have a critical perspective of the news and information they get from those organizations. They can't have that critical attitude unless they have the skills to analyze-- to take the media apart and to put it back together. And the best way of doing that is to do it in a hands-on way. So, the idea of media-literacy in moving image means the ability to have a hands-on engagement-- to be able to reconstruct words, movies, soundtracks, pictures-- in such a way that they can tell a different story or tell it in a slightly different way. " -- Paul Gerhardt, project lead of the BBC's Creative Archives Project.