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Lost in the sea of bodies that had taken over Robson Street, the Olympic spirit took on an almost organic quality. A vibrant energy radiated from every direction. This was, quite possibly, the largest party in Canadian history. And yet, right in the middle of the festivities, in an unassuming building in the Downtown Eastside, people packed into a large white room to watch a talk on copyright law given by American law professor Lawrence Lessig, which was being streamed live over the Internet from Harvard University.

The talk was on fair use, a legal doctrine (similar to fair dealing in Canada) that specifies the ways in which a portion of a copyrighted work can be used legally for purposes such as education, criticism, and news reporting. Lessig's concern is that copyright law often stands in the way of what he terms “remix culture.” There is no question that the Internet has changed many aspects of our lives, but people often overlook how it has changed the way we interact with our culture.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, culture was something that most people participated in. People played sports, instruments, and sang songs. This all changed with the invention of mass communication technologies. “Technologies that helped you listen, but not speak. Technologies that made you watch, but didn't let you create,” said Lessig.

Television and radio turned people into passive consumers of culture, rather than active participants and creators. People watched sports and listened to music, instead of playing sports and singing. The Internet changed all this. “It's a fact that anybody with access to a $1 500 computer can take sounds and images from the culture around us and remix them and make them available in ways that speak to people in a language that they hear,” Lessig said. “Today, rather than gathering on the back lawn or on a corner singing these songs together, people gather in this digital environment, on this platform. And using free Internet platforms, share these bits of culture they create.”

What Lessig is concerned about is that copyright law presents a legal barrier to this type of remix culture. And in an ironic twist, that's exactly what happened to Lessig after the talk. Throughout the speech, he played a series of videos in which people had taken popular songs and remixed them with their own video. A video of the talk was posted on YouTube and, less than a week later, the audio was disabled on that video due to a copyright notice from Warner Music Group, which owns the copyright on one of the songs that Lessig used in his presentation.

Although playing a clip of a song in a lecture is likely covered under fair use, this incident highlights one of the major problems with U.S. copyright law: the notice and takedown system. Under the terms of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are exempt from legal liability in copyright claims, so long as they take down offending material as soon as someone notifies the ISP that they are hosting a copyrighted work.