what we learn from conservatives.

And I'm at a stage in life where I'm yearning for my old days,

so I want to confess to you

that when I was a kid,

indeed, I was a conservative.

I was a Young Republican, a Teenage Republican,

a leader in the Teenage Republicans.

Indeed, I was the youngest member

of any delegation

in the 1980 convention that elected Ronald Reagan

to be the Republican nominee for president.

Now, I know what you're thinking.

(Laughter)

You're thinking, "That's not what the Internets say."

You're thinking, "Wikipedia doesn't say this fact."

And indeed, this is just one of the examples

of the junk that flows across the tubes

in these Internets here.

Wikipedia reports that this guy,

this former congressman from Erie, Pennsylvania

was, at the age of 20, one of the youngest people

at the Republican National Convention,

but it's just not true.

(Laughter)

Indeed, it drives me so nuts, let me just change this little fact here.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

All right. Okay, so ... perfect.

Perfect.

(Laughter)

Okay, speaker Lawrence Lessig, right.

Okay.

Finally, truth will be brought here.

Okay, see? It's done. It's almost done. Here we go.

"... Youngest Republican," okay, we're finished.

That's it. Please save this.

Great, here we go.

And ... Wikipedia is fixed, finally.

Okay, but no, this is really besides the point.

(Applause)

But the thing I want you to think about when we think about conservatives --

not so much this issue of the 1980 convention --

the thing to think about is this:

They go to church.

Now, you know, I mean, a lot of people go to church.

I'm not talking about that only conservatives go to church.

And I'm not talking about the God thing.

I don't want to get into that, you know; that's not my point.

They go to church, by which I mean,

they do lots of things for free for each other.

They hold potluck dinners.

Indeed, they sell books about potluck dinners.

They serve food to poor people.

They share, they give,

they give away for free.

And it's the very same people

leading Wall Street firms

who, on Sundays, show up

and share.

And not only food, right.

These very same people

are strong believers, in lots of contexts,

in the limits on the markets.

They are in many important places

against markets.

Indeed, they, like all of us, celebrate this kind of relationship.

But they're very keen that we don't

let money drop into that relationship,

else it turns into something like this.

They want to regulate us, those conservatives,

to stop us from allowing the market to spread in those places.

Because they understand:

There are places for the market

and places where the market should not exist,

where we should be free

to enjoy the fellowship of others.

They recognize: Both of these things have to live together.

And the second great thing about conservatives:

they get ecology.

Right, it was the first great Republican president of the 20th century

who taught us about

environmental thinking -- Teddy Roosevelt.

They first taught us about ecology

in the context of natural resources.

And then they began to teach us in the context of

innovation, economics.

They understand, in that context,

"free." They understand "free" is an important

essential part of the

cultural ecology as well.

That's the thing I want you to think about them.

Now, I know

you don't believe me, really, here.

So here's exhibit number one.

I want to share with you my latest hero, Julian Sanchez,

a libertarian who works at the, for many people,

"evil" Cato Institute.

Okay, so Julian made this video.

He's a terrible producer of videos,

but it's great content, so I'm going to give you a little bit of it.

So here he is beginning.

Julian Sanchez: I'm going to make an observation about the way

remix culture seems to be evolving ...

Larry Lessig: So what he does is he begins to tell us

about these three videos.

This is this fantastic Brat Pack remix

set to Lisztomania.

Which, of course, spread virally.

Hugely successful.

(Music)

And then some people from Brooklyn saw it.

They decided they wanted to do the same.

(Music)

And then, of course, people from San Fransisco saw it.

And San Franciscans thought they had to do the same as well.

(Music)

And so they're beautiful, but this libertarian

has some important lessons he wants us to learn from this.

Here's lesson number one.

JS: There's obviously also something really deeply great about this.

They are acting in the sense that they're

emulating the original mashup.

And the guy who shot it obviously has a strong eye

and some experience with video editing.

But this is also basically just a group of friends

having an authentic social moment

and screwing around together.

It should feel familiar and kind of resonate

for anyone who's had a sing-a-long or a dance party

with a group of good friends.

LL: Or ...

JS: So that's importantly different from the earlier videos we looked at

because here, remix isn't just about

an individual doing something alone in his basement;

it becomes an act of social creativity.

And it's not just that it yields

a different kind of product at the end,

it's that potentially it changes the way that we relate to each other.

All of our normal social interactions

become a kind of invitation

to this sort of collective expression.

It's our real social lives themselves

that are transmuted into art.

LL: And so then, what this libertarian draws from these two points ...

JS: One remix is about

individuals using our shared culture

as a kind of language to communicate something to an audience.

Stage two, social remix,

is really about using it to mediate

people's relationships to each other.

First, within each video,

the Brat Pack characters are used as a kind of template

for performing the social reality of each group.

But there's also a dialogue between the videos,

where, once the basic structure is established,

it becomes a kind of platform

for articulating the similarities and differences

between the groups' social and physical worlds.

LL: And then, here's for me,

the critical key to what

Julian has to say ...

JS: Copyright policy isn't just about

how to incentivize the production

of a certain kind of artistic commodity;

it's about what level of control

we're going to permit to be exercised

over our social realities --

social realities that are now inevitably

permeated by pop culture.

I think it's important that we

keep these two different kinds of public goods in mind.

If we're only focused on how to maximize

the supply of one,

I think we risk suppressing

this different and richer

and, in some ways, maybe even more important one.

LL: Right. Bingo. Point.

Freedom needs this opportunity

to both have the commercial success

of the great commercial works

and the opportunity

to build this different kind of culture.

And for that to happen, you need

ideas like fair use to be central and protected,

to enable this kind of innovation,

as this libertarian tells us,

between these two creative cultures,

a commercial and a sharing culture.

The point is they, he, here,

gets that culture.

Now, my concern is, we Dems,

too often, not so much.

All right, take for example this great company.

In the good old days when this Republican ran that company,

their greatest work was work that built on the past, right.

All of the great Disney works

were works that took works that

were in the public domain and remixed them,

or waited until they entered the public domain to remix them,

to celebrate this add-on remix creativity.

Indeed, Mickey Mouse himself, of course,

as "Steamboat Willie,"

is a remix of the then, very dominant,

very popular "Steamboat Bill"

by Buster Keaton.

This man was a remixer extraordinaire.

He is the celebration and ideal

of exactly this kind of creativity.

But then the company passes

through this dark stage

to this Democrat.

Wildly different.

This is the mastermind behind

the eventual passage of what we call

the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act,

extending the term of existing copyrights

by 20 years,

so that no one could do to Disney

what Disney did to the Brothers Grimm.

Now, when we tried to challenge this,

going to the Supreme Court, getting the Supreme Court, the bunch of conservatives there --

if we could get them to wake up to this -- to strike it down,

we had the assistance of Nobel Prize winners

including this right-wing

Nobel Prize winner, Milton Friedman,

who said he would join our brief

only if the word "no brainer"

was in the brief somewhere.

(Laughter)

But apparently, no brains

existed in this place

when Democrats passed and signed

this bill into law.

Now, tiny little quibble of a footnote:

Sonny Bono, you might say, was a Republican,

but I don't buy it.

This guy is no Republican.

Okay, for a second example,

think about this cultural hero,

icon on the Left,

creator of this character.

Look at the site that he built: "Star Wars" MashUps,

inviting people to come and use their creative energy

to produce a new generation of attention

towards this extraordinarily important cultural icon.

Read the license.

The license for these remixers

assigns all of the rights

to the remix back to Lucas.

The mashup is owned by Lucas.

Indeed, anything you add to the mashup,

music you might add,

Lucas has a worldwide perpetual right

to exploit that for free.

There is no creator here to be recognized.

The creator doesn't have any rights.