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[source of the video]
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OK, that's here our introduction to an argument I want to make here today
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And the argument invokes an idea that my friend and colleague Jamie Boyle
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has been speaking of for more than a decade.
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So this Idea is that we recognize first that creativity happens within an ecology.
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An ecology, an environment that sets the conditions of exchange.
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And number 2 these ecologies are importantly different.
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There are different ecologies of creativity.
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Some of these ecologies have money at the core
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Others don't have money at the core.
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And some have money and practices that don't depend upon money
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right at the core. They are different ecologies of creativity.
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So think about the professional ecologies of creativity,
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ecologies that the Beatles or Dylan or John Philip Souza created for.
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For these ecologies the control of the creativity is imposrtant
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to assure the necessary compensation that the artist needs
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to create the incentives for that artist to create.
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In these professional ecologies, these ecologies depend upon
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an effective and efficient system of copyright.
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But in what we could call an amateur ecology of creativity
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by which I don't mean amateurish, In stead I mean an ecology
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where the creator creates for the love of the creativity
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and not for the money. In that kind of ecology,
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an ecology that lives within what we could call, following Yochai Benkler,
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the sharing economy. That's the economy that children live within
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or friends live within, or lovers live within
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in those kinds of economies, for these -
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people don't use money to express value
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and to set the terms of their exchange.
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Indeed, if you introduced money into those sharing economies,
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you would radically change the character of those economies.
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So imagine friends, inviting the other for lunch the following week
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and the answer is "Sure, how about for 50 bucks?"
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Or imagine dropping money right in the middle of this kind of relationship
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we radically transform it into something very different.
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The point is to recognize how creativity in many contexts,
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in the context Souza was romanticizing,
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is a creativity that exists outside of an economy of cash.
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In this sense, this amateur ecology depends not upon control
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and copyright, but instead depends upon this opportunity for free use and sharing.
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And then finally, think about the scientific ecology
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of creativity, of the scientist, or the educator, or the scholar.
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There's a very interesting picture here, this 16th century scholar
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notice the kind of guilty look on his face. And look down
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and see exactly what he's doing: he's copying from that book.
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He's just a pirate from long ago this scholar here, right?
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because of course, scholarship is and has always been this activity
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of creating within a mixed economy of free and paid
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A creator here has a love for his or her creativity,
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a love that exceeds how much she or he is paid.
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But it's that economy that defines the mixed ecology of scientific knowledge
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This ecology depends not upon exclusive control,
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but both on free and fair use of creative work that is built upon
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and then spread. Now, the key here is to recognize that these ecologies
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coexist. They complement each other.
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And here is the critical point: a copyright system must support
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each of these separate ecologies. It's not enough for it to support one
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and destroy the others. It must support each of them, it must
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support the professional ecology of creativity,
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through adequate and efficient incentives.
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But it must also support the amateur and scientific ecologies of creativity
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through essential freedoms that they depend upon.
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Or again, more graphically, copyright needs to do two things, not just one.
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It needs to provide the incentives that the professionals
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need by protecting the freedoms that the amateur and scientific creations need.
