Lawrence Lessig’s “Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy” explores the effects of copyright laws on new generations of consumers and creators. The book’s core thesis argues that criminalizing amateur uses of media artifacts (remixing, mashups, etc) not only makes no sense in the context of a technium of sharing and duplication, but also has wide-ranging and detrimental effects on creative and civic activity.

Lessig begins by contrasting “Read Only” (RO) and “Read/Write” (RW) culture. He goes on to argue that, although RW culture has been around for a long time, the emergence of new creation and distribution technologies — everything from Photoshop to YouTube to BitTorrent — has rendered old copyright laws absurd and destructive.

Remix culture produces a variety of goods that are suppressed or criminalized by the current copyright regime. Lessig argues that this censure is not only counter to the impulses of community, creativity, and education that are core to the praxis of much of remix culture; shutting down this kind of activity is also economically unwise. Hybrid business models that leverage user engagement, content sharing, and remixing are used as examples of how moving beyond 20th century notions of copyright can be profitable and sustainable. Lessig uses these examples to frame some concluding remarks about policy reform.