STEVEN JOHNSON: Where do you draw the line? I mean, think about your own work, when somebody appropriates your own work and manipulates it in some ways, what are the points at which—I think we have probably a lot of consensus in the room that some form of remixing is important. So the problem then becomes how do you define the boundaries of it? I mean, do you have a clear sense of that in your head or is it a kind of case by case…

SHEPARD FAIREY: It’s absolutely a case-by-case basis. The people that work with me. I do a clothing line—it’s a licensing deal. I have people that are always trying to look out for my interests. Actually, I frequently don’t listen to them because I want to err on the side of allowing people frequently to use my images as long as it’s something that’s transformative or even if it’s not transformative if it’s such small scale that I see something of myself when I was the kid with the Xerox machine in my mom’s office running off copies of my favorite album covers to cut stencils from to make my own T-shirts. You know, did I want like the FBI showing up at my house to bust me for one Sex Pistols shirt that I made? You know. I think a lot of it has to do with a case by case.

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LAWRENCE LESSIG: It’s an important line to try to draw because some people think that this debate is between those who want to make money and those on the free culture side who don’t think money should be earned by anybody anywhere, and that’s not the division, right? Artists have got to make money. Artists have got to earn enough money to be able to flourish and do their art. That’s the purpose of the copyright system, and that’s an important purpose for the system to play.  

The critical thing is to draw the distinction between places where somebody is “ripping you off,” and places where they’ve been inspired by you and to celebrate that inspiration. And what I’ve been excited about, and the reason I’m kind of optimistic about this issue now, which is a problem for me, because I’m so depressed and pessimistic about everything that I just can’t hang around the free culture debate anymore—that’s why I’ve got to go to corruption where I will never be optimistic about anything—is that some of the biggest, most powerful bullies in this field are getting it. So, for example, Viacom has a lawsuit against YouTube that I think has no basis in law, but anyway they have that lawsuit, but Viacom also has a very sharp distinction, where they say, you know, “if you take a—if you take a Colbert show and you upload it to YouTube and you don’t do anything to it, we will take it down within twenty-four hours, we will notice them right away. But if you do anything to it, if you remix it at all, if you express some creative on top of the stuff you’ve taken, we won’t touch it.” Now, they’re not saying they’re licensing it, they’re not saying you’re free to do it, but they’re saying, “we’re going to exercise restraint, so that we encourage one kind of creativity that we think celebrates our work while stopping a kind of abuse that is obviously competing with the business model.”

Now, if more businesses behaved like that, I think we could get back to a balance that really made sense of exactly the line you’re trying to draw, but too many of these businesses are controlled, I’m sorry to say, by lawyers who think about this as a religious question. Like, “the right has been violated, we have to stop the violation of the right.” Without ever asking, “Does it really help our business or hurt our business that people are creatively remixing and spreading our creativity?”

Watch/listen to our February 26, 2009 program, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, featuring Lawrence Lessig, Shepard Fairey, Steven Johnson, presented by LIVE and Wired here…