My friends Craig and Liz are in Brazil for three weeks. He is blogging the thing, and he calls the place, Florinopolis, “laid back”.
This got me thinking about the RiP A Remix Manifesto movie that we watched in class and played at HPX this year. You get the feeling that people around the world are just laid back about stuff, like following copyright laws, or stopping mashups, or creating a western based IP ownership regime.
In the move the former Secretary of Commerce for the Clinton administration talks about how the deal was that the world would get to make stuff but that the US would own ideas, create ideas to sell and license. The information economy. The idea economy. But the rest of the world isn’t keeping their end of the deal. In Brazil, they teach kids how to sample in public school, and have totally open copyright laws, compared to us. They don’t care what we think. They kinda laugh at us and our tense, northern, whitey, European rule following.
So I am drinking a coffee and woolgathering I just had a thought. Maybe the rest of the world is laughing at us. Maybe China, Brazil, India, love that we tie ourselves in knots creating restrictive rules, while they keep moving forward without them. Maybe they find being laid back works for them.