Read–write culture

Thursday, January 15th, 2009 | Publishing, Science, Web

The Books and Arts section in this week’s Nature has a review of the new book by Lawrence Lessig called Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Lessig is founder of Creative Commons, from which Science Commons recently spawned (see my earlier post).

The reviewer writes:

Lessig argues that a strict divide between the world of sharing and the world of commerce is counterproductive. He wants to refocus attention away from the stalemated copyright wars and towards a more vibrant ‘read–write culture’ that remixes rather than replaces what came before.

[...]

In Remix, he outlines the case for licences that make one’s work free for non-commercial use but reserve any right to commercial exploitation to the author — something that is traditionally anathema to the free-software movement.

In general, Lessig centers his arguments around debates that are of interests to a wide audience, like the ones surrounding the music industry and web-portals like YouTube. The issue of copyright is, however, of importance for science as well since it impacts the way scientific knowledge is disseminated and shared. An example in the realm of myrmecology concerns the taxonomic literature dealing with species descriptions that is stored in antbase.org: as of today, you can freely access all the taxonomic works produced on this group of insects since 1758 with the exception of the most recent ones, as they are protected by copyright laws.

In my view, you have to look no further for a prime example of the benefits of a read-write cultural than the practice of science itself, hence my interest in how the Science Commons projects develops.

The book is now in my (already long) reading list. You can (freely) access the review in full at Nature’s’ website:

How to end the copyright wars. Jonathan Zittrain reviews Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig. Nature 457, 264-265 (15 January 2009) | doi:10.1038/457264a.