Response to Lessig and Sousa

While reading Lessig’s account of Sousa’s efforts extend copyright laws, I found myself agreeing and disagreeing not necessarily with Lessig but with Sousa since Lessig was only retelling a brief history of Sousa’s effort in Congress. I can understand Sousa’s fear for loss of creativity and the motivation to create, or the in other words the loss of the “amateurism.” He was scared that common people would give up their own individual efforts to play instruments, which use to be the only means to having music in a household, to only listening to “infernal machines” play music. I can understand this fear, because since my own childhood my incentive to create music or play an instrument has almost disappeared. I would rather just turn on my ipod and play whatever music I’m craving for.

I believe that technology today has the ability revive the RW culture. In Sousa’s day, where the potential of technology may have not been wholly grasped, machines may have spelled the end for most musical creativity. But today, I think technology has extended musical creativity and has opened new doors in the musical realm that were previously unavailable in Sousa’s time. Also, technology today has allowed anyone and everyone to share the music. Just go to youtube. There are countless videos of people singing and playing instruments, individually or in groups. What Sousa didn’t and couldn’t know was that technology would eventually enable a RW music culture.