On a long flight from Singapore to Seattle, I spent a worthy hour watching and listening to Lawrence Lessig’s talk at the Educause 2009 conference last November. Lessig has been described as a copyleftist but I don’t believe that. Copyright as a legal doctrine is well and alive especially when the legal foundation of Open Source Software is based on copyright law. Lessig’s brainchild, Creative Commons, is wholly based on the principles of copyright.
I sympathize with his frustration that so much knowledge and content is entangled in the “thicket of copyright” that we the people are deprived of the benefit of such knowledge. However, my belief is that we have arrived at this place not through any Machiavellian plan but through the individual efforts of thousands of lawyers through the decades doing their job of protecting their clients’ interests. In most cases, it is reserving to the copyright owner the maximum amount of rights to the intellectual property rather than enabling it to be shared.
Unfortunately, the unintended or intended cumulative consequence is that there is complete fragmentation of IP ownership. Lessig has a number of painful examples in his talk.
Which is why, I applaud the efforts by Creative Commons to have templates which creators can choose from to express their intentions as to the use of their creative work rather than default to usual copyright regime. It has made me think about how my own intentions viz a viz my website and this blog.
Enjoy the talk.
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