Its all just one, really

Tom Chance pens a thoughtful piece on Lawrence Lessig's views on the 'two culture economies': supposedly, an amateur, "sharing economy" and a second, 'traditional', full copyright "commercial economy" (how this "commercial economy" got to be the 'traditional' one is beyond me). If that distinction sounds dubious to you (and like it might have internalized, unwittingly, the very dichotomy that the restrictive culture that Lessig thinks he is contesting, wants to promote) then read the piece for yourself. I found Lessig's _Free Culture_ extremely persuasive when I read it, and its hard to reconcile his view of two separate creative economies with the vision that seemed to run through that book - that all of culture, not some subdivision of it, was reliant on sharing, cross-pollination, and innovation based on relentless derivation. I found that analysis exhilarating, and often used the examples of borrowing lines one heard on a train in one's writing or joke-making or conversation-starters in my classes in Computer Ethics (at Brooklyn College) as entrees into an extended discussion on copyright and patent issues in software. That vision, I'd argue, would reject the kind of dichotomy that Lessig endorses (and Chance's piece is an extended take on that riff, as it argues for a kind of interdependence and inter-relationship between the two that in the final analysis renders that kind of distinction meaningless to begin with).