Intellectual Property in the Digital Age
The following is a list of resources regarding the serious implications of applying Property Law and Intellectual Property (IP) Law to digital and open content. A solid overview of the Creative Commons and the work of Lawrence Lessig, much of which is freely available on ITConversations.
Overview of the Creative Commons
 The Creative Commons is “a nonprofit organization that offers flexible copyright licenses for creative works”. In many countries, anything you create is now covered by copyright automatically, which can unnecessarily restrict the ways that others can benefit from your work. For example, I am sure many of you have wanted to include an image in a presentation you are giving, but were unsure if you were allowed to. If you would like your work to benefit a wider audience, you can attribute a Creative Commons licence to it, specifying if it can be used for profit or not, if it can be modified or not, and if you would like to be credited. An example of this is at the bottom of this page.
Overview of Electronic Frontier Foundation
 Quoted from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
EFF is a nonprofit group of passionate people — lawyers, technologists, volunteers, and visionaries — working to protect your digital rights.
From the Internet to the iPod, technologies are transforming our society and empowering us as speakers, citizens, creators, and consumers. When our freedoms in the networked world come under attack, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the first line of defense. EFF broke new ground when it was founded in 1990 — well before the Internet was on most people's radar — and continues to confront cutting-edge issues defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights today. From the beginning, EFF has championed the public interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights.
Blending the expertise of lawyers, policy analysts, activists, and technologists, EFF achieves significant victories on behalf of consumers and the general public. EFF fights for freedom primarily in the courts, bringing and defending lawsuits even when that means taking on the US government or large corporations. By mobilizing more than 50,000 concerned citizens through our Action Center, EFF beats back bad legislation. In addition to advising policymakers, EFF educates the press and public. Sometimes just defending technologies isn't enough, so EFF also supports the development of freedom-enhancing inventions.
EFF is a donor-funded nonprofit and depends on your support to continue successfully defending your digital rights. Litigation is particularly expensive; because two-thirds of our budget comes from individual donors, every contribution is critical to helping EFF fight —and win—more cases.
Overview of Lawrence Lessig
 Lawrence Lessig is a hugely respected authority on IP. He has respect for both creators and consumers. Lessig has a deep understanding of IP through history and a wide understanding of IP through different cultures around the world. He can also clearly communicate to a wide audience the history of IP, current problems and clear ways of overcoming them. Lawrence Lessig is the chair of the Creative Commons Foundation and a Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He has a homepage at www.lessig.org and a blog at www.lessig.org/blog
Background of Lawrence Lessig
This background has been sourced from multiple ITConversations seminar synopsis.
Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Lessig was also a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and a Professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court.
More recently, Professor Lessig represented web site operator Eric Eldred in the ground-breaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Lessig was named one of Scientific American's Top 50 Visionaries, for arguing "against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online."
He is the author of The Future of Ideas and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. He also chairs the Creative Commons project. Professor Lessig is a boardmember of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a Board Member of the Center for the Public Domain, and a Commission Member of the Penn National Commission on Society, Culture and Community at the University of Pennsylvania.
Professor Lessig earned a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a JD from Yale.
Professor Lessig teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, contracts, comparative constitutional law, and the law of cyberspace. He is currently planning a course, Law and Virtual Worlds, for Spring 2003 with Julian Dibbell.
His book, Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace, was published by Basic Books, and The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, is available from Random House. His most recent book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, is now available free online at www.free-culture.cc and from Penguin Press.
Free Resources by Lawrence Lessig
This is a list of presentations, and an audio book that Lawrence Lessig has made available free of charge to the public domain. The seminars are hosted by an ITConversations, who have a huge resource of presentations recorded at a lot of recent IT conferences.
Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity
Type: Audio Book
Format: MP3 (Will play in your internet browser or the media player that comes with Windows or Mac OS10)
Author: Lawrence Lessig
Description: (Amazon.com Customer Comment)
Really provocative. I loved this illuminating and thought-provoking book. Lessig makes a compelling argument against extended copyright laws and other issues that may interfere with creating new projects based on derivative works.
The book was a bit repetitive but easy to read unlike his earlier book, the Future Of Ideas, which I found to be overly technical.
The Internet opens up so many vast possibilities for us to expand creative intellectual ideas but these will never materialize if we continue on our current path of making it nearly impossible to borrow from other people's works.
Lessig is imminently reasonable and has a great deal of respect for property and the rights of authors or creators. As soon as I finished reading Free Culture, I registered two of my Web blogs with Creative Comments. Now they both say "Some Rights Reserved." :-)
Sigrid Macdonald, Author of D'Amour Road
More info at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594200068/ref=nosim/rds-20
Size: Approximately 100mb
Duration: Approximately 10 hours
Date Recorded: 2004-03-29
Link: The audio book is available from www.turnstyle.org/FreeCulture
The softcopy (digital text) version of the book is available from www.free-culture.cc and the hardcopy (paper) version by Penguin Press is available for purchase at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594200068/ref=nosim/rds-20
Hosted By: Derek Sivers and HostBaby / CDBaby and assembled by Scott Matthews
The Comedy of the Commons
Type: Audio Seminar
Format: MP3 (Will play in your internet browser or the media player that comes with Windows or Mac OS10)
Author: Lawrence Lessig
Description:
Lawrence Lessig charts a history of IP, which helps him hilight the difference between physical propery law (which can result in a tradgedy of the commons) and intellectual property law (which can result in a comedy of the commons).
This is an extremely valuable talk, from Lessig, who was named one of Scientific American's Top 50 Visionaries, for arguing "against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online."
Size: 44mb
Duration: 01:36:23
Date Recorded: 2004-09-23 (at the SDForum Distinguished Speaker series)
Link: http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail349.html
Hosted By: ITConversations
The Creator's Dilemma: Open Source, Open Society, Open Innovation
Type: Audio Seminar
Format: MP3 (Will play in your internet browser or the media player that comes with Windows or Mac OS10)
Author: Lawrence Lessig
Description: (quoted from ITConversations seminar synopsis)
Just as the early Internet thrived in the absence of centralized control (putting the "intelligence" at the edges of the network, with open protocols at the center), so, too, will software thrive if set free at its most critical, foundational layers. This talk sketches the boundaries of protection that intellectual property law should set on code, but argues that extremism is now defeating these limits, just as perpetual copyright has in the media world. The consequence is an environment within which modular creativity is increasingly constrained.
Size: 14mb
Duration: 00:40:06
Date Recorded: 2004-03-16 (at the Open Source Business Conference 2004)
Link: http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail131.html
Hosted By: ITConversations
Law
Type: Audio Seminar
Format: MP3 (Will play in your internet browser or the media player that comes with Windows or Mac OS10)
Author: Lawrence Lessig
Description: (quoted from ITConversations seminar synopsis)
There are two very different topics that fit within the category "law." One is the extraordinarily important growth of law blogs, and their direct (and indirect) influence on the practice of law, and the decision of cases. It is said that Howard Bashman's blog has become the 38th Clerk at the Supreme Court. How will this area of blog space continue to grow?
The second important topic is about the relationship between the law and blogs -- IP and libel law in particular. While copyright law is fairly good about the "fair use" of text, it is not very good with music, images and video. How will copyright and trademark law accommodate the increasing range of creativity folded into blog space? Will podcasting be one freedom too far? How might we expect litigation in this area to develop? What legislation might help avoid costly and burdensome litigation?
Size: 40mb
Duration: 01:27:52
Date Recorded: 2004-11-06 (at Bloggercon III)
Link: http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail285.html
Hosted By: ITConversations
Re: Mix Me
Type: Audio Seminar
Format: MP3 (Will play in your internet browser or the media player that comes with Windows or Mac OS10)
Author: Lawrence Lessig
Description: (edited from ITConversations seminar synopsis)
Culture is remix, and remix, culture. Humans have always made new culture by taking and remixing existing cultures, and have always been free to do so. Until recently the written word was the central medium for remix. As technology has advanced the mechanisms by which we remix our culture have changed to keep pace but the law has not. The question at hand is: should our freedom to remix culture change when the ordinary means we use to remix culture changes?
As our technology and our culture become enslaved at the hands of the RIAA, MPAA, and others, Lessig proposes 4 steps we must take to counteract the degradation of our remix rights: 1) connect, 2) teach, 3) punish, and 4) politicize.
Size: 23mb
Duration: 00:49:41
Date Recorded: 2005-03-17 (at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology (ETech) conferene)
Link: http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail474.html
Hosted By: ITConversations
Clearing the Air About Open Source
Type: Audio Seminar
Format: MP3 (Will play in your internet browser or the media player that comes with Windows or Mac OS10)
Author: Lawrence Lessig
Description: (edited from ITConversations seminar synopsis)
Somewhat focused on Open Source Software, but applicable to all Open content.
Is supporting freedom tantamount to supporting piracy? What position should you be taking on this? What roles do the congress and courts play? Are the lobbyists and lawyers even trying to solve the problems or happy to live in this candyland of every increasing litigation?
Why is free software and wireless access being hit by nearly a billion dollars of big business money? Why are the lessons of community welfare being forgotten and the bogey of the welfare state being raised? Is the GPL really unfair to developing nations as Jonathan Schwartz says?
Plenty of questions and passionate answers; answers that will lead to an age that you define through the technologies that you build.
Size: 29mb
Duration: 01:04:12
Date Recorded: 2005-04-06 (from the Larry's World series)
Link: http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail497.html
Hosted By: ITConversations
Web 2.0
Type: Audio Seminar
Format: MP3 (Will play in your internet browser or the media player that comes with Windows or Mac OS10)
Author: Lawrence Lessig
Description: (edited from ITConversations seminar synopsis)
An engaging and often humorous presentation outlining the legal dangers faced by makers of new media and society in general. By presenting media remixing as the "creative writing" of the future he highlights the dangers of moving from a free culture where discussion and free speech are taken for granted, to a permission culture where permission to reproduce media messages will depend on the use of that media.
Arguing for a balanced approach to copyright law Professor Lessig uses a number of examples of remixed media where restricting permission to the original media threatened to restrict creativity. In a permission culture, access to copyrighted material is controlled by lawyers and permission is not being granted. Lessig invites us imagine our current society if, in the late 19th century, courts had decided that permission was required to publish and share each image captured using the emerging technology of personal photography.
The presentation finishes with a haunting reminder that the freedom to remix text and express ourselves through free speech was earned should not be taken for granted - if we lose the freedom to remix media we ultimately lose the right to speak up and lose the power to express ourselves.
Size: 10mb
Duration: 00:21:08
Date Recorded: 2004-10-07 (at the Web 2.0 Conference)
Link: http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail332.html
Hosted By: ITConversations
Who Owns Culture
Type: Video Seminar
Format: Quicktime mov (needs QuickTime 7 for Windows or Mac)
Author: Lawrence Lessig
Description: (quoted from YouAreTV)
Introduction (by Lawrence Lessig) to a discussion with Jeff Tweedy and Steven Johnson at the NYPL on April 7, 2005.
Size: 44mb
Duration: 00:42:00
Date Recorded: 2005-04-07 NYPL
Link: http://www.youare.tv/watch.php?id=534
Hosted By: YouAreTV
Lessig@RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology)
Type: Video Seminar
Format: MP4 (needs QuickTime 7 for Windows or Mac)
Author: AmitoRIT
Description: (quoted from YouAreTV)
Lawrence Lessig discusses Network neutrality, Free Culture, Google Print, Orphaned Works and other topics at the Rochester Institute of Technology
Size: 508mb
Duration: 02:00:00
Date Recorded: 2006-03-24
Link: http://www.youare.tv/watch.php?id=545
Hosted By: YouAreTV
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