Larry Lessig: How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law presented at TED. 19 minutes.
We take it for granted that copyright serves to protect our work, to ensure we receive proper credit and to compensate us for our labors. Larry Lessig, lawyer, activist, professor and founder of Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society paints a rather different picture of U.S. copyright laws and their impact on creativity, especially with regard to our children. Clearly, existing copyright laws struggle to address this relatively new medium, especially with regard to educational fair use (and quite a few would argue, rather poorly) and the ease with which many of us can and do create, (re)mix and mash up digital content. The Creative Commons was a direct response to the perceived inflexibility and complexity of existing copyright laws.
So where are we heading? Vicki Davis over at Cool Cat Teacher Blog recently posted on What the best colleges are doing about Open Access and while it does seem that institutional change is occurring, Vicki draws our attention to a very important and often overlooked constituency—students, including graduate students and the work they produce. Josh brought this up in our discussion this last week. What do you think? Does affixing a Creative Commons license to your work give you control over your work and how it is used and attributed?
One could well argue that the two articles, “The Online Amplification Effect” by Margaret Soltan, and “Admissions of Guilt” by Terry Calhoun are sobering reminders of the unforeseen and unintended consequences of our increasingly transparent and readily accessible online lives. Will Dick Hardt’s Identity 2.0 and Claim ID be part of the solution? Aside from becoming an Internet hermit—if that’s even possible now—what should we be doing? What should we be modeling for our students?
I’m looking forward to checking in on your discussions from Orlando : ). See you in December.
