[source of the video]

OK, that's here our introduction to an argument I want to make here today

And the argument invokes an idea that my friend and colleague Jamie Boyle

has been speaking of for more than a decade.

So this Idea is that we recognize first that creativity happens within an ecology.

An ecology, an environment that sets the conditions of exchange.

And number 2 these ecologies are importantly different.

There are different ecologies of creativity.

Some of these ecologies have money at the core

Others don't have money at the core.

And some have money and practices that don't depend upon money

right at the core. They are different ecologies of creativity.

So think about the professional ecologies of creativity,

ecologies that the Beatles or Dylan or John Philip Souza created for.

For these ecologies the control of the creativity is imposrtant

to assure the necessary compensation that the artist needs

to create the incentives for that artist to create.

In these professional ecologies, these ecologies depend upon

an effective and efficient system of copyright.

But in what we could call an amateur ecology of creativity

by which I don't mean amateurish, In stead I mean an ecology

where the creator creates for the love of the creativity

and not for the money. In that kind of ecology,

an ecology that lives within what we could call, following Yochai Benkler,

the sharing economy. That's the economy that children live within

or friends live within, or lovers live within

in those kinds of economies, for these -

people don't use money to express value

and to set the terms of their exchange.

Indeed, if you introduced money into those sharing economies,

you would radically change the character of those economies.

So imagine friends, inviting the other for lunch the following week

and the answer is "Sure, how about for 50 bucks?"

Or imagine dropping money right in the middle of this kind of relationship

we radically transform it into something very different.

The point is to recognize how creativity in many contexts,

in the context Souza was romanticizing,

is a creativity that exists outside of an economy of cash.

In this sense, this amateur ecology depends not upon control

and copyright, but instead depends upon this opportunity for free use and sharing.

And then finally, think about the scientific ecology

of creativity, of the scientist, or the educator, or the scholar.

There's a very interesting picture here, this 16th century scholar

notice the kind of guilty look on his face. And look down

and see exactly what he's doing: he's copying from that book.

He's just a pirate from long ago this scholar here, right?

because of course, scholarship is and has always been this activity

of creating within a mixed economy of free and paid

A creator here has a love for his or her creativity,

a love that exceeds how much she or he is paid.

But it's that economy that defines the mixed ecology of scientific knowledge

This ecology depends not upon exclusive control,

but both on free and fair use of creative work that is built upon

and then spread. Now, the key here is to recognize that these ecologies

coexist. They complement each other.

And here is the critical point: a copyright system must support

each of these separate ecologies. It's not enough for it to support one

and destroy the others. It must support each of them, it must

support the professional ecology of creativity,

through adequate and efficient incentives.

But it must also support the amateur and scientific ecologies of creativity

through essential freedoms that they depend upon.

Or again, more graphically, copyright needs to do two things, not just one.

It needs to provide the incentives that the professionals

need by protecting the freedoms that the amateur and scientific creations need.