This link has been bookmarked by 13 people . It was first bookmarked on 22 Aug 2006, by tony curzon price.
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22 Aug 06
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14 Jul 06
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12 Jun 06
murraywNice little article: Lawrence Lessig explains his mission to limit the cultural damage caused by copyright law.
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11 Jun 06
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09 Jun 06
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There was another reason why Lessig focused on this area. "It wasn't a fair fight: all the great lawyers were on the side of IP maximalism [the view that intellectual property (IP) should be protected forever] because they were all hired by Hollywood. So I kind of felt like a lawyer with a guilty conscience, and just got into it to try to see if there was a way to balance it." There was also a specific problem: the extension by Congress in 1998 of the term of copyright from "life of the author plus 50 years" to "life plus 70 years" (as in the UK). The practical result is that nothing new will enter the public domain in the US until 2019, and that art, which is built on the work of others, will be deprived of millions of sources of inspiration. In 2002, Lessig succeeded in getting the US supreme court to consider the issue. His case drew on the US constitution, which said copyright was for "limited times" and "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". He argued that by continually extending copyright - 11 times in the past 40 years - Congress had effectively made it unlimited; furthermore, the retrospective extension was not "promoting" progress, since many of the authors it applied to were dead. To Lessig's chagrin, the court was not persuaded. But he drew an important lesson. "The key insight I felt I got was that you were never going to win this until you got recognition in the public." His book Free Culture was an attempt to explain to people what was at stake. Its message is summed up in the subtitle: "How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity."
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Rachel CInterview with Larry Lessig by Glyn Moody, 8 June 2006
LawrenceLessig CreativeCommons law legal policy free Guardian technology trends politics copyright open interview GNU
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