Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and the author of The Future of Ideas and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. For some time now he has been writing and speaking on issues relating to copyright, to intellectual freedom, especially as these concepts relate to the new global commons known as the Internet. When the internet was created, it was designed to be a decentralized network, a dumb carrier of bits. All the intelligence in the network was concentrated at the sending and receiving ends of said bits: in the email clients, the web browsers (a recent invention). The web was just the pipeline down which the information travelled. This simplicity of design and lack of central control fostered an explosion of creativity that can be compared to other great historical periods of innovation like the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment. You've heard this all before: at first the Internet was a wild and wooly frontier
Lawrence Lessig gave one of his last public speeches on copyright at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference. He will be taking time off of the speaking circuit to prepare for the Eldred v. Archroft case, which he is arguing before the Supreme Court this fall. Copies of the speech are available in many formats here: http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/
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