Why Crush Them? When Louis Armstrong borrowed from his peers, the law smiled on him. So why does it look upon his successors as digital criminals?

Byline: Lawrence Lessig (Lessig is a professor at Stanford Law School and author, most recently, of "Free Culture.")

In the next five years, there will be more than a billion additional machines for making music in the world. Not pianos or guitars, but computers. These computers are increasingly changing the way music gets made. A whole host of "composers" use these machines to create powerful new compositions. And as these creators can become experts without 20 years of piano lessons, these machines are inviting a much wider range of creative souls to express their creativity.

Much of this music follows in the footsteps of hip-hop. Using powerful (but cheap) digital technologies, any kid can now remix sounds found on an ordinary CD and, after adding his or her own style, produce a new creative work. And while the genre has developed far beyond what hip-hop originally was, the inspiration is the same: how do you take found creativity, and make it something new?

Nor is music the only place where this remix culture is flourishing. University of Southern California researcher Mimi Ito describes an emerging anime music video (AMV) culture, in which tens of thousands of kids take Japanese anime recorded from TV and then, using personal computers, recut these anime to fit them to popular songs or, in some cases, popular movie trailers. "You don't understand how important this is," one American father told me after I had described to an audience this emerging form of art. "My son couldn't get into college until he showed them his AMVs."

Remix in art is, of course, nothing new. What is new is the law's take on this remix. For while the law of copyright protected Louis Armstrong as he made "fair use" of the compositions of his jazz contemporaries, courts in the United States have held that there's no fair-use right to a sound recording at all. Any sample taken without permission, however small, is "piracy." And such is the view of almost all in the movie industry. In his recent book, "Darknet," J. D. Lasica describes asking seven major studios for permission to include short clips from popular movies in his own home movie. Lasica promised he would not show the film to anyone except his family. All but one denied the request. Asked if he could use two 10-second clips of Daffy Duck, for example, Warner Brothers wrote, ...