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Lessig on copyright
Nov. 6th, 2009 01:29 amI've just been to an excellent talk by Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard law professor who has been active in setting up the Creative Commons licence, the idea of Science Commons and the Open Access movement. He is a really good speaker and he set out some of the problems with the current hegemony of one particular view of copyright.
One interesting issue is that of preservation, for example of documentary films from the 1960's. In order to duplicate the film onto new media for preservation (and ideally distribution as DVDs), the archivist has to get permission from a huge number of corporates, for each clip of newscast or other material that has been assembled into the documentary. This is clearly a case where the current legal framework has an unsatisfactory effect.
Lessig isn't against copyright for those artists and others who want it. He does note that other communities (including some artists and most academics) have different goals, of promoting sharing. He didn't mention provenance tracking, which is an important issue in this space.
He also discussed the Google Book agreement and expressed dissatisfaction with the approach to works that are out of print. In practice, it is pretty much impossible to get agreement to make these books available, because copyright ownership is not tracked and once a book is out of print, nobody is sufficiently motivated to keep track of who owns the copyright.
The Creative Commons, Scientific Commons and Open Access movements are all doing significant work in these areas. More needs to be done, especially by academics changing the way they publish papers and data.
I'll stress that Lessig is a really good speaker. I'm going to practice some of his techniques. In the meantime, if you ever get the chance to hear him talk, take it.
One interesting issue is that of preservation, for example of documentary films from the 1960's. In order to duplicate the film onto new media for preservation (and ideally distribution as DVDs), the archivist has to get permission from a huge number of corporates, for each clip of newscast or other material that has been assembled into the documentary. This is clearly a case where the current legal framework has an unsatisfactory effect.
Lessig isn't against copyright for those artists and others who want it. He does note that other communities (including some artists and most academics) have different goals, of promoting sharing. He didn't mention provenance tracking, which is an important issue in this space.
He also discussed the Google Book agreement and expressed dissatisfaction with the approach to works that are out of print. In practice, it is pretty much impossible to get agreement to make these books available, because copyright ownership is not tracked and once a book is out of print, nobody is sufficiently motivated to keep track of who owns the copyright.
The Creative Commons, Scientific Commons and Open Access movements are all doing significant work in these areas. More needs to be done, especially by academics changing the way they publish papers and data.
I'll stress that Lessig is a really good speaker. I'm going to practice some of his techniques. In the meantime, if you ever get the chance to hear him talk, take it.
