Reviews

"In "Remix: Making Art and Culture Thrive in the Hybrid Economy", a ferociously argued new book, Lessig calls for a truce."

Elise Ackerman, San Jose Mercury News

This sometimes rambling manifesto is his defense of America's youths, whose actions are criminalized by "intellectual property" laws devised not long after Thomas Edison started turning out phonographs and Kinetoscopes.

Andrew Dunn in the Detroit Free Press.

Lessig’s proposals for revising copyright are compelling, because they rethink intellectual-property rights without abandoning them.

Briefly Noted, The New Yorker.

Remix brilliantly puts a name to those businesses trying to bridge the gap between the commercial (Amazon) and sharing (Wikipedia) aspects of the web: the "hybrid" enterprise. Their looser, less paranoid approach to copyright allows fans to explore their enthusiasms. Lessig cites many studies – Warner's U-turn around fan usage of Harry Potter is a prime example – to show the commercial benefits this brings.

I don't quite go along with his general enthusiasm for "remixing" as an art form. Musicians who explore harmony, melody and rhythm might ask: is it more important to play and compose a new soul riff, for new times, than just rest on the auratic power of a James Brown sample? But Lessig is surely right that digital culture requires governance that is more subtle and ecological, judging a balance of forces between commerce and community, than precise and draconian. The Democrats could do a lot worse than give the formidable Lessig some work in this area.

Pat Kane, in The Independent.

In this book, Lessig identifies victims even closer to home: our children. "How," Lessig asks, is the war on piracy "changing how they think about normal, right-thinking behavior?" The creative practices of today's youth include a range of activities -- file sharing, most notoriously, but also the production of mashups -- that are illegal under the current copyright regime, but criminalization is having little success as a deterrent. Instead, the focus on "piracy" is changing our relationship to the law itself, which has come to seem arbitrary and unfair, and it's hampering creative and educational uses of new technologies. It's time to consider, Lessig argues, whether the costs of this war are too high.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick at Barnes & Nobel.

"But Remix is Lessig's weakest effort to date, a derivative essay that rehashes a lot of his older work. Like Martin Scorsese doing another mobster flick, Lessig seems uninspired, groping for a fresh take on familiar themes. Most annoying, he devotes only the last 35 pages of the book to his reform plan, and some of those ideas are not even that new." Spencer Ante in Businessweek

Fittingly enough, Lessig's book is a literary remix of sorts. Once dubbed a "philosopher king of Internet law," he writes with a unique mix of legal expertise, historic facts and cultural curiosity, citing everything from turn-of-the-century Congressional testimony to Wikipedia to contemporary best-sellers like Chris Anderson's The Long Tail. The result is a wealth of interesting examples and theories on how and why digital technology and copyright law can promote professional and amateur art. As he sees it, reforming copyright law is the only way to salvage it: "We, as a society, can't kill this new form of creativity. We can only criminalize it. We can't stop our kids from using the technologies we give them to remix the culture around them. We can only drive that remix underground."

M.J.STEPHEY in Lawrence Lessig: De-Criminalizing the Remix, in TIME.

Lessig sketches a program of legal reform and culture practice that is a cogent first step in this process. He closes with the exhortation that "there is no justification for the copyright war that we now wage against our kids. Demand that the war stop now."

Wesley Yang, Lawrence Lessig's Brave New World, in AmLawDaily.

"The reason our copyright regime has flagged so badly, Lessig believes, is the influence of the aggressive record, film and music lobbies. He is therefore shifting his focus to regulation and government corruption; this is to be his last book on intellectual property. The field will be the worse without him, but any cause would be lucky to gain such a trenchant advocate."

Michael O'Donnell, "Remix" by Lawrence Lessig, in the San Francisco Chronicle.

"A public intellectual of zealous spirit, a skilful polemicist engaged in the discourse of law, politics and the worldwide web - Lawrence Lessig is a prophet for the internet age."

Lewis Jones, The sharing generation, in the Financial Times.

"It is not easy having a calm conversation about media these days. ... The most potent bombs have been thrown by Lawrence Lessig, a law professor, litigator, and author."

L. Gordon Crovitz, Remix by Lawrence Lessig, in Commentary.