Naive commie wants new cultural revolution

Lawrence Lessig’s ideas, expressed in his books, his many lectures and the Creative Commons project have great impact. Ideas with the power to change how people think and act usually are controversial, exactly because they disturb the status quo. That must be the reason why people constantly hurl the most absurd accusations at the law professor. Recently Lessig has been charged with wanting a new cultural revolution because of a web 2.0 blog post where he distinguished between fake sharing sites such as YouTube (does not allow downloading) and true sharing sites (Flickr, Revver and more). As Lessig points out in a follow-up post, what he wrote had more to do with an analysis about the emerging hybrid economy than with a communist revival:

in my view, the really critical question for the Internet economy is how well companies negotiate the hybrid economy. In my view, those who follow Web 2.0 values are likely to profit most; those who don’lt, won’lt. Thus, when David Bowie tries to jump into the mashup/remix world by offering prizes for the best remix of his content, but demanding the rights to all the creativity produced by the remixers, he’ls violating a Web 2.0 principle, and by doing so, weakening the extraordinary potential his effort could have.

Or, as he concludes, do you think Jimmy Wales is a communist because he wants Wikipedia to be freely available and share- and remixable?

Eagerly awaiting the next chapter of Lessig bashing, here’s a replay of what happened when he urged academics at a conference in Norway to help spread and share knowledge. Naive and dangerous man!

UPDATE: New post from Lessig on Creative Commons values:

The key is to build alternatives that creators on the Internet can use to both create as they wish and keep control of their creativity. That’s the challenge I see over the next four years. And as we review over the next few weeks some of the best of CC from around the world, you’ll begin to see how this challenge might be met.