Larry Lessig, of EFF, Creative Commons and Net copyright battle fame, gave an excellent talk at TED in Monterey, CA, earlier this year. In this talk, he makes a pretty good, common sense argument about how the law is trying to strangle creativity. More interestingly, and the part that spoke very clearly to me, was how the law was corrupting our culture and turning many of us, especially those on the younger side of 40, in to those who live their lives against the law.
His argument (and, again, watch the 20 minute video, as it's excellent) is that the law, buttressed by conglomerate lawyers, proactively seeks to punish those who remix and rebuild content in to something new. He's not defending those who steal content outright and sell it as their own (which he should not). The side effect of this is that this strangling of creativity has a corrosive effect on our culture, and that it is raising an entire generation who live their lives (at least their creative lives) against and outside the law. If you post something on your MySpace page or make a hilarious video remix and post it on YouTube and use someone else's (copyrighted) content, you're breaking the law. But this (and this is critical and key) is how many, many young people communicate their lives. As such, they begin to see their lives and the key ways in which they communicate their lives (their photos or music on MySpace) as against, or outside, the law.
As a gay man who can still get fired from my job without any legal protection in 26 states and who can get jailed or killed in many parts of the world for holding my husband's hand, living against the law is something I'm familiar with. Until a few years ago, I could be arrested in any state in the country for having sex with the man I've chosen to share my life with (and in some parts of the country, men still are, even though it's clearly in violation of U.S. law). Living against the law diminishes you as a person, and, in very subtle ways, it makes you devalue your contribution to society.
In a culture where thugs are glamorized and where more and more youth express disaffection with the simple fact of work and societal contribution, anything that directly forces them to live against the law because they want (or need) to express themselves in the medium that makes the most sense for them is both troubling and disturbing. If society, represented by its laws, says "You are not allowed to be yourself, to express yourself, to share and communicate and collaborate about your life in any way that we don't expressly proscribe," why would people want to participate in that society? Where will the next generation of artists come from? What great stories will go untold because we aren't allowed to tell them?
Again, like Lessig, I'm in no way advocating wholesale copyright infringement. That's just not cool. Artists deserve (fair!) compensation for the work they create. But the impulse to create, to contribute back to the community, to make everyone feel welcome and whole and part of society, should be our priority, rather than embedding in generation after generation the idea that their only life is one that must be lived against the law.