In this essay published by the Wall Street Journal, Lawrence Lessig outlines his idea for a truce in the copyright wars.  The essay is Lessig's remix of his own book, Remix, comes out on October 16, 2008.  This post, if you will, is a remix of a WSJ article.

A YouTube video of a 13-month-old baby dancing to a barely-audible background noise of Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" is not in any meaningful sense a copyright infringement.  To the extent that it is, the law has failed everyone from the music industry to the listening audience.  It's time to admit that as the means of music distribution have changed, the meaning of copyright must change with it.

Unable to conceive of music as anything other than a live performance, John Phillip Sousa, in 1906, warned Congress about "infernal machines" (presumably Edison's phonograph or Berliner's gramophone) displacing the need for live performances by musicians.  It turned out that recorded music drove demand for music, and spawned an entire industry, and gave birth to thousands of new musicians, as well as new musical forms, and live music in all forms from the marching band to the rock concert still thrives.

Today, unable to conceive of music as anything other than a pre-packaged product, RIAA has similar issues about another "infernal machine" (the computer) which displaces the need for prepackaged music.  Lessig argues that the current copyright regime is inadequate to address remix culture, and that remix culture -- with its emphasis on taking prepackaged music, deconstructing it, and then reproducing it in a new and novel way -- is a way to spawn an entire new industry, all without jeopardizing the right of the original artist for compensation for his original work.

Lessig's suggestions for ending the war:  Worry less about if a copy has been made in favor of why the copy was made.  Simplify intellectual property law and restore efficiency to the cultural marketplace.  And decriminalize Generation X.