Interview With Lawrence Lessig On Future Rights

tres3 writes "In an interview with the O'Reilly Network Mr. Lessig discusses many current issues that may have future legal implications. He starts with MGM's request for Certiorari in the Grokster case. His conclusion is that ReplayTV was forced out of business by a legal challenge, not a legal victory. Lessig continues on to discuss, among other things, The Creative Commons and their new Sampling License and how it may affect the way that some movies and music, that contain samples from other sources, are made in the future. From the article: 'So the same act of creativity in some sense, you know, taking, creating, mixing out of what other people do, is legal in the text world and illegal in the digital media world.'"

Re:The CCL is a great idea, but...

[aussie_a]

Why the hell can't I draw Mickey Mouse smoking a joint if I want to?

I believe you can. You just can't disseminate it. I on the other hand can draw Mickey Mouse smoking a joint AND disseminate it. God Bless Australia.

Re:Unconstiutional...

[BrynM]

Want to extend on what you mean by "unconstitutional"? Which part of the (I'm assuming American) constitution does it break?

That would be Atricle 1, Section 8 [findlaw.com] most likely. I'm not supporting his view, just pointing out what I think he's talking about.

Re:I think this is appropiate here ....

[mrchaotica]

Wow, what a great essay! Do you mind if I print it out and distribute it?

By the way, it could use a little editing -- in the 5th paragraph, it should be "Our communications will either have to be monitored or free, our privacy will either have to intruded or protected," not "half." And in paragraph 11, I think you meant "Just because an institution calls something a property right doesn't mean that it is," not "intuition."

Re:The CCL is a great idea, but...

[asuffield]

It's definitely a step in the right direction that Lessig has codified the Creative Commons license...

Creative Commons is a giant step backwards, because it's taken all the people who might have been interested in creating free non-software works, and persuaded them to release their stuff under a non-free, GPL-incompatible license, such that all of us working on free software can't really make any use of it. All of the Creative Commons version 2 licenses are broken and should be avoided, just like the GNU FDL, the OSL, etcetera. You can see a fairly complete summary of all the problems found so far at http://people.debian.org/~evan/ccsummary [debian.org]

This should not come as a great surprise. Have a look at the people responsible for creative commons [creativecommons.org]. Note how they're mostly lawyers and corporate types. This is not a grassroots effort, despite the way they allude to being related.

Creative Commons has shown no interest in fixing their licenses. Consider why that might be.

Lessig's latest book for free

[Octagon Most]

Prof. Lessig has put his money where his mouth is, so to speak. He is offering his latest book, Free culture, as a free download [free-culture.cc]. You can get it as a 2.4MB PDF, a bittorrent, or a in a bunch of other formats. Enjoy.

Bill Gates said this in 1991

[Anonymous Coward]

"
If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. ... The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.
"
This was quoted by Fred Warshofsky in "The Patent Wars" of 1994. The text is from an internal memo written by Bill Gates to his staff. Part of has appeared in another Gates memos.
http://swpat.ffii.org/archive/quotes/index.en.html #bgates91 [ffii.org]