OA#7 Reading Response

After reading New Literacies and Social Practices of Digital Remixing by Lankshear&Knobel, I was interested in how broadly Lawrence Lessig defined the idea of remixing.  It is true that almost everything that we do in life is inspired by things that we have witnessed or experienced and our responses rely on the original product or action, but I had never thought of our responses as remixes.  In my mind, I made a distinction between reactions and remixes.  Reactions, in my opinion, are new material influenced by the original product or referencing the original product, but not containing any form of the original product.  To me, remixes are works that directly combine the original product and other material.  It is a very vague distinction, but I felt myself compelled to make it while reading the article.  

In college, I took an economics class on The Information Economy.  It focused on the pricing and markets surrounding experience goods like music and movies.  Some of the most interesting conversations we had were about the copyright laws of experience goods and how they help/hinder content creators.  This article reminded me of technology's role in the advent of extreme copyright laws.  The authors touched on the how access to digital editing programs allows remixes to be made "in bedrooms, family rooms, and basements around the world."  But access to the internet seems to be the biggest force behind copyright fever.  The internet allows creators to easily share their remixes with much larger audiences than ever before.  In a pre-internet world, remixers had to work much harder to spread their remixes and they usually had geographically limited audiences.  Even if they were making money from their remixes, their audiences were small enough that it did not impede on the original artist's revenue.  With the internet, remix audiences are much larger and the profit potential is much higher.  Therefore, artists want to protect their original content and any money earned from it.