ACSBlog: The Blog of the American Constitution Society

Writing in The Washington Post this morning, Stanford law professor (and creator of the Creative Commons alternative licensing regime) Larry Lessig comments on recently announced plans by Lucasfilm to make the Star Wars movie franchise available for "remixing" by fans and independent artists.  Identifying the business rationale for remixing and noting "[a] dark force" within the prevailing intellectual property regime limiting its realization, he predicts what he frames as an inevitable future paradigm of greater consumer control and participation over digital content.
The business rationale is straightforward:

Turning consumers into creators is the latest fad among companies scrambling for new profits in the digital age. How better to revive a 30-year-old series than by enlisting armies of kids to make the content interesting again? These traditionally protective commercial entities are creating "hybrids" -- leveraging free labor to make their commercial properties more valuable.

Professor Lessig notes, however, that "[a] dark force . . . has influenced Lucasfilm's adoption of Eyespot's technology."

A careful reading of Lucasfilm's terms of use show that in exchange for the right to remix Lucasfilm's creativity, the remixer has to give up all rights to what he produces. In particular, the remixer grants to Lucasfilm the "exclusive right" to the remix -- including any commercial rights -- for free . . . . The remixer becomes the sharecropper of the digital age.

. . . .

[T]here is a deep divide between those who believe that obsessive control is the hybrid's path to profit and those who believe that freer access will build stronger, more profitable ties. Predictably, on the Vader-side of control is often a gaggle of lawyers who continue to act as though nothing interesting has changed in copyright law since the time of John Philip Sousa. These lawyers counsel their clients that control is always better. They ridicule efforts to strike a different balance with the army of creators being called into the service of their clients.

Finally, Professor Lessig's prediction:

A decade from now, this Vaderesque advice will look as silly as the advice lawyers gave the recording industry a decade ago. New entrants, not as obsessed with total control, will generate radically more successful remix markets. The people who spend hundreds of hours creating this new work will flock to places and companies where their integrity as creators is respected. As every revolution in democratizing technologies since the beginning of time has demonstrated, victory goes to those who embrace with respect the new creators.