Lawrence Lessig's 'Do Copyright Laws Stiffle Creativity'

The central message of Lawrence Lessig's video "Do copyright Laws Stiffle Creativity" describes how copyright infringement is impeding the centuries old practice of people coming together, and dancing and singing to the popular music of the day. Illustrating his point, Lawrence shows scenes from YouTube videos, created by average people, showing themselves or people they know, emulating the dance moves of recording artists while that recording artist's copyright song is playing. In some instances those YouTube videos have been removed from YouTube at the behest of the original artist who is citing copyright laws as the reason, an act Lessig views as selfish and wrong. Lawrence also shows a poster of President Obama, styled like an Andy Worhol Print, but with the word "Hope" attached, stating it violated copyright infringement and the creator of that poster was ordered to pay restitution to the original artist. Lawrence's message asserts the human connection, and communication derived from this connection, is more important than the rights of the artist who produced the original work. …show more content…
This video's subject matter will draw both resistant and sympathetic audiences. Resistant audiences will possibly consist of artists who want to protect their work, and people who have a strong belief in the idea people should be able to control what they have created. These people will be seeking the reasoning and ideas held by people who believe art belongs to society, probably as a way to argue against that position. Sympathetic audiences will be looking for allies that believe the same things they believe, reaffirming their point of view. They will be seeking specific social and sociological reasons to cite supporting why they should be allowed to use published music and