Lawrence Lessig is a name I’ve heard over the years but until recently, I hadn’t listened to what he had to say. Now that I have, I just want to point everyone to listen to this man.
First up is Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (2004). Available free (under appropriate Creative Commons licensing) it should be read by everyone who consumes or creates media. I discovered this book as a collaborative audio book — each chapter read by a different individual — on one of my favourite internet haunts, archive.org: Free Culture Audiobook. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Today, I wandered over to TED to exercise my brain while I digitize some rather old media (Dickens’ original serial novels from the 1800s) and found Lessig’s 2010 TED Talk, “Re-examining the Remix” (embedded below) — what astounded me about this is that, in the US at least, the biggest supporters of copyright and related content controls and limits have been the Democrats, not the Republicans. Maybe this should have been obvious but it was certainly an eye-opener for me.