Lawrence Lessig had an interesting essay yesterday at the WSJ. Based on his upcoming book remix, the essay is subtitled “Digital technology has made it easy to create new works from existing art, but copyright law has yet to catch up”.

Among the solutions he proposes, the most interesting one is about deregulating the copy, focusing on the ultimate use of the copyrighted material rather than the actual act of copying. It essentially says that the use of a song by a political campaign in a public meeting and by an amateur YouTube mom in a home video has to be treated differently.

Although amateur, the content on sites like YouTube does generate revenue implicitly. It would be unfair to let a company like Google eat that up given that it did not contribute to the content at all, only provided the infrastructure to broadcast it. Sites like Break.com do offer uploaders some share of the revenue but the most popular video site in the world still doesn’t.

An ideal scenario would be something like this: You upload your remixed video on YouTube. YouTube parses it to realize that you have used some copyright material. It automatically sets aside a revenue share from that video for the copyright owner and publishes the video.

The current model and the usage of DMCA by sites like YouTube is a mockery of the concept of copyright. It’s inefficient, scales poorly and also inhibits creativity of the remixers. Using the remixers’ creativity by letting the original copyright owner collect part of the profit would not only encourage such remixes but would also give credit where it is due. Now only if YouTube could be less greedy and bold enough to take such step…