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2004 Utah L. Rev. 961 (2004)
Free(ing) Culture for Remix

handle is hein.journals/utahlr2004 and id is 971 raw text is: Free(ing) Culture for Remix* Lawrence Lessig** I begin with some stories to frame an argument about a potential that technology has given our society, and about the threat the law has raised for that potential. In 1839, Louis Daguerre created the Daguerreotype, a technology for producing what we would call photographs. The technology was expensive and cumbersome, and the market for photography was tiny. Then in 1888, George Eastman invented the Kodak: a simple and inexpensive technology for producing photographs-a consumer, rather than professional, technology for producing photographs-and the market for photography took off. That market included Kodak cameras of course. But as the technology spread, it came to include other cameras too, as well as film, photo albums, camera lighting, and everything else necessary to make photography function. About the time Eastman invented his simple camera technology, there was a question bouncing around courts in the United States and elsewhere that would affect Eastman's technology quite directly: did a photographer need permission before he captured and used someone else's image? For some, this was no small matter: some believed they lost their soul if their image was captured without their permission. But for most, the question was a simple matter of privacy. Nonetheless, courts were quick to resolve this question against the interests of people whose image was taken. Except as limited by privacy rules, or as later modified by rights of publicity, images in the United States were free. Anyone was free to capture, and copy, an image of someone else without permission up front. It was in part because of this freedom that the market for photography exploded as it did. We could imagine, for example, how things would be had the law gone the other way: a rule that required permission before an image is captured and copied, supported by a rule that insisted that businesses producing or reproducing images verify that permission for the original image had been secured. (A rule that imports to photography, that is, all the rules that *CC 2004 Lawrence Lessig. Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA. **Professor of Law, Stanford Law School. Thanks to Darien Shanske for excellent research support. Many of the arguments presented here are discussed in more depth in LAWRENCE LESSIG, FREE CULTURE: How BIG MEDIA USES TECHNOLOGY AND THE LAW TO LOCK DOWN CULTURE AND CONTROL CREATIVITY (2004).

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