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Lessig Keynote

March 30, 2008 - 10:20am — bxb11

Lawrence Lessig Speech

Stories

Enabling Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age & Your Role

  • Writing is a democratic practice - all should/can do it.
  • 9-college writing - why do we do what we do?
  • Most writing produced here is crap - but kids learn here. How hard it is to write, the complexity. It teaches them the value of creativity.

"Quoting" in writing. We take, use, build upon - without the author's permission.

Imagine if we asked the author for permission to quote? Crazy. This points out the democracy of writing - it's by all, for all.

Masses vs. the Elite

  • Speaking was separated between the two.  Elite vs. vlugar.
  • John Phillips Sousa - Spoke to congress about being against talking machines - said they would ruin culture and music creativity.
  • He was afraid we would lose in the capacity to engage - have a "read only" culture.
  • For a period of time, he seemed correct. We were a passive culture.

Argument Against This

  • What is the freedom to read, write, quote, remix?
  • Copyright is important, but needs to be balanced against creativity.
  • iTunes music store - icon of the new culture - in terms of acess.
  • Read only culture - Professional & commercial mix.
  • Read-write culture - Amateurs & sharing mix. Wikipedia. Remixing. The importance of this has noting to do with technique. Anyone with a computer can do it. This is 21st century writing. The new latin is words and text. remix is  What the vulgar use. Quoting is now taking existing media and creating a new expression from it.

Copyright insists you need permission to do this BEFORE you do it, however. This is a radical change from the past, when you could quote without permission. Today we have to justify all uses. It renders the read-write culture powerless. This is harmful to creativity. Why should the Hollywood business model be applied to all form of creativity?

Google - 18M books to be scanned in. Grant free access to them. Full access to public domain works. For other books, snippets - as much as the publisher allows.

16% in public domain, 75% out of print yet under copyright, 9% full copyright.

The OOP will be invisible to the public, due to fuzzy nature of permissions.

We need a Some Rights Reserved Model, not an All Rights Reserved.

We need a legal license, XML tags, and info for the rest of us that we understand.

This will only happen if we all contribute to a change. It must come from teaching and learning.

How do we preserve the old system - change it so it does work, and allow for new expressions of creativity?

We can't stop creativity, we can only criminalize it, drive it underground, piratetize it.