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[bryant]

Someone in my family who will remain nameless for soon to be apparent reasons got me a T-shirt for Christmas. Kinda. It looks a lot like this. Except he didn't buy it from threadless.com.

He downloaded the image, printed it onto transfer paper, and ironed it onto a blank T-shirt.

So I'm horrified, right? Intellectual property, the ability to profit from creativity, etc. I'd buy one except that design is sold out. But I'm also tremendously amused. Talk about your remix culture. This particular family member is like fifteen years old. He didn't even think twice about getting the T-shirt that way. Immediate satisfaction, no wait time.

If people want to be selling intellectual property in the future? Better figure out a way to get it into the hands of consumers immediately, cause people are gonna be doing their own pre-fab. Culture's changing. It's probably not going to take Lawrence Lessig to get rid of our current problems with copyright; that stuff is all going to seem silly in twenty years or so.

Well within my lifetime. The rate of change gets scary.

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

A few years ago, one of my stepdaughters made mix CDs as gifts for her siblings and cousins one year comprised entirely of stolen mp3s. I was not amused and i told her so.

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

Culture's changing. It's probably not going to take Lawrence Lessig to get rid of our current problems with copyright; that stuff is all going to seem silly in twenty years or so.

Yeah, OK. But is it going to seem silly because we'll be living in a utopian creative remix free-for-all, or because Big Content will have so thoroughly stamped out that kind of theft out that Lessig et al seem in retrospect like deluded Commies on the dustbin of history? Because I could imagine someone reading your story and saying "Hmm. Better start encoding JPGs with DRM so 15-year-old reprobates can't steal intellectual property from the Legitimate Garment Industry." If that sounds farfetched, imagine that the T-shirt in question is not from a hipster boutique like Threadless but from Disney Inc. I can't see the future, but I'm happy we at least have Lessig and the EFF and their buddies fighting the good fight for now.

[bryant]

I'd have been less amused by that. Not entirely sure why.

The whole "where are my jetpacks?" thing is not exactly original with that T-shirt, which may be why.

[bryant]

Darn you and your knowledge of technology and history, particularly the monopoly secured by AT&T...

The essential problem is this, though (and I don't know if it's solvable). At some point, you have to display the content. I believe it's possible to secure computers at the chip level, but you gotta worry about the monitor and the printer as well. If you encode the stream between the two devices, only upgraded monitors (say) work with the upgraded computer.

And that means that there's a monolithic upgrade path, which raises customer awareness, and will people buy DRM that obstructs things they wanna do? Dunno. iTunes has strongish DRM and people use it, but it still allows you to burn CDs. And -- since there isn't a monolithic upgrade requirement for iTunes -- you burn a CD, then copy that CD ad infinitum and you've worked around the problem.

I guess it's not that I don't think Lessig's work is important, but rather than I don't think his conceptual legal framework (as accurate as it seems to me) is gonna be the driving factor.