Remix culture

Remix culture, sometimes read-write culture, is a society that allows and encourages derivative works by combining or editing existing materials to produce a new creative work or product. A remix culture would be, by default, permissive of efforts to improve upon, change, integrate, or otherwise remix the work of copyright holders. While a common practice of artists of all domains throughout human history, the grow of exclusive copyright restrictions in the last several decades limits this practice more and more by the legal chilling effect. As reaction Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, who considers remixing a desirable concept for human creativity, works since the early 2000s on a transfer of the remixing concept into the digital age. Lessig founded the Creative Commons in 2001 which released Licenses as tools to enable remix culture again, as remixing is legally prevented by the default exclusive copyright regime applied currently on intellectual property. The remix culture for cultural works is related and inspired by the earlier Free and open source software for software movement, which encourages the reuse and remixing of software works.

Lawrence Lessig described the Remix culture in his 2008 book Remix in comparison to the default media culture of the 20th century under usage of computer technology terminology as Read/Write culture (RW) vs. Read Only culture (RO).

In the usual Read Only media culture is the culture consumed more or less passively. The information or product is provided by a 'professional' source, the content industry, that possesses an authority on that particular product/information. There is a one-way flow only of creative content and ideas due to a clear role separation between content producer and content consumer. The emergence of Analog mass production and duplication technologies (pre-Digital revolution and internet like radio broad-casting) inherently enabled the RO culture's business model of production and distribution and limited the role of the consumer to consumption of media.

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