So I got here. Margaret was determined to arrive in Evanston in time for me to hear Larry Lessig give his presentation at Northwestern, so although we observed speed limits between Rochester and Evanston, we clamped down on food, drink and haircut stops. And now I’m sitting beside Rex Masterson in a small presentation room on the Northwestern campus. The title of the talk was announced as “Is Intellectual Property Copyrightable?” but the first slide bears the title “Building the Creative Commons.”
Much of Lessig’s presentation repeats material from Lessig’s famous OSCON speech (without any suggestions that free-software developers had done any less than they ought to have) and subsequent discussions among Lessig and his conversation partners; anyone who’s been reading here will know what he’s saying, so I’ll reserve my overview of the presentation or after the “More” button.
In the presentation and question-and-answer, Lessig displayed real depth of feeling and commitment, not only about copyright and creativity, but also (especially) about drug patents and the African phase of the AIDS pandemic. Lessig made it clear that he has no problem with drug patents, as opposed to software patents which he (pace Dave Winer) called “insane.” He excoriated the political inertia that withholds patented drugs from Africa — where they could save tens of millions of lives — for fear of compromising the high prices they charge in the US. Lessig went so far as to compare inactive US citizens of this historical moment with Germans of the thirties and forties who stood idly by and permitted the government to execute millions of innocent citizens.
He walked through the premises, decision, and ramifications of the Eldred case, and his voice caught a couple of times. “Every morning,” he said, “I wake up and think of a couple of questions I wish I’d answered differently. . . .”
After the talk, I mentioned the coming Disseminary roll-out to Prof. Lessig, and — in a landmark moment that memorabilia collectors will savor for ages — obtained from him his digital autograph. I asked for it on behalf of his ardent fan Mary Hess, to whom I dedicate this, typed with his own fingers on my TiBook (in Lucida Grande, in the Notebook feature of NetNewsWire, in case anyone is keeping track):
Larry Lessig
Lessig begins with a history of Steamboat Bill > Steamboat Willie > Mickey Mouse, illustrating the principle of creative re-use of public-domain materials. A further example: gruesome folk tales to Grimm(?s) Fairy Tales to Snow White and Cinderella. Not just Disney, though; he reminds us of the dojinshi manga-remix scene in Japan. Both the dojinshi and manga show ?extraordinary creativity,? according to Lessig. He shows the Bush-Blair love duet as a further demonstration ? rip, remix, burn with ingenuity. Culture, in this model, is not simply consumed (as a couch potato), but set into creative motion. Companies committed to the rip-mix-burn culture stand to profit from behavior that the RIAA regards as a fundamental threat to ?the music business.?
Lessig supposes that manga is dead in the US; he proposes that the of the thriving ?remix? culture starves the creative atmosphere that feeds manga.
Lessig describes a ?copyright war? in which (according to Jack Valenti) our children are the terrorists. This war defines copyright as a traditional value that we must defend from piratical copiers. Lessig rebuts by illustrating just how fluid the legal principles of copyright have been over the years: in terms of duration, purpose, proportion of published work that was registered to copyrighted, and concentration of copyright holders. Today, everything that bears copyright is copyrighted for a full 95 years, because there is no need to apply for an extension. And everything is copyrighted, automatically, without any effort on the creator?s part.
Lessig uses the work done by (whom?) who calculated that only 2% of the works covered by the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act are presently commercially available.
The intent of the first law was to prevent a subsequent publishers from reprinting a prior publisher's work, and in order for the first publisher to enjoy that protection, he had to register his copyright and deposit a copy of the work in a copyright repository. We've gone from a default position of freedom to a default position of control.
How does he suggest that we respond? First, by attending not to the extremes ? who suppose that all content should always be preserved (on one hand), and that no content should ever be protected (on the other) ? but to interactions among people who reckon that some content should be protected to some extent. Lessig points to Creative Commons as an organization for ?cultural environmentalism.? He uses the Dinosaurs’ Anti-Mammal Protection joke. A story I hadn't heard before: he was flying United Flight 235 toward San Francisco, listening to the cockpit radio channel on his headset. on a collision course. The tower and the cockpit were not talking to each other, because the flight was United 235, and the tower was calling flight 253. Lessig wondered why simple technological devices couldn’t smooth out that wrinkle so that his plane might not be stuck on a collision course with some other aircraft; by the same token, he hopes that some way may be found to head off the collision between the entertainment corporations and the customers who pay the fares. I’m not sure the metaphor works, but it’s an unnerving story; I’m glad I never listen to the cockpit channel.
Posted by AKMA at April 24, 2003 09:20 PM | TrackBackMore examples of creative copying from ages past:
Shakespeare:
href=http://home.telepath.com/~hrothgar/shakespeare.html
Robert Burns:
http://home.telepath.com/~hrothgar/burns.html
G.F. Handel:
href=http://home.telepath.com/~hrothgar/muffat_to_handel_c.html
The techniques of creative copying are vital to our literary and musical life, and an emphasis in the copyright duration debate on the needs of creative copiers is not misplaced. But we need to keep in mind that the public domain is the public's right. Copyright expiration is not just for derivative authors, but for everyone. It allows us to enjoy the benefits of a competitive market in books and other formerly-copyrighted things, and to enjoy the benefits of freewheeling creative copying of the public domain by authors.
Posted by: Timothy Phillips at April 25, 2003 09:46 AMThis variable is then used in various lines of code, holding values given it by variable assignments along the way. In the course of its life, a variable can hold any number of variables and be used in any number of different ways. This flexibility is built on the precept we just learned: a variable is really just a block of bits, and those bits can hold whatever data the program needs to remember. They can hold enough data to remember an integer from as low as -2,147,483,647 up to 2,147,483,647 (one less than plus or minus 2^31). They can remember one character of writing. They can keep a decimal number with a huge amount of precision and a giant range. They can hold a time accurate to the second in a range of centuries. A few bits is not to be scoffed at.
Posted by: Polidore at January 12, 2004 11:34 PMLet's see an example by converting our favoriteNumber variable from a stack variable to a heap variable. The first thing we'll do is find the project we've been working on and open it up in Project Builder. In the file, we'll start right at the top and work our way down. Under the line:
Posted by: Court at January 12, 2004 11:34 PMThis code should compile and run just fine, and you should see no changes in how the program works. So why did we do all of that?
Posted by: Josias at January 12, 2004 11:34 PMSince the Heap has no definite rules as to where it will create space for you, there must be some way of figuring out where your new space is. And the answer is, simply enough, addressing. When you create new space in the heap to hold your data, you get back an address that tells you where your new space is, so your bits can move in. This address is called a Pointer, and it's really just a hexadecimal number that points to a location in the heap. Since it's really just a number, it can be stored quite nicely into a variable.
Posted by: Margery at January 13, 2004 11:01 AMThis variable is then used in various lines of code, holding values given it by variable assignments along the way. In the course of its life, a variable can hold any number of variables and be used in any number of different ways. This flexibility is built on the precept we just learned: a variable is really just a block of bits, and those bits can hold whatever data the program needs to remember. They can hold enough data to remember an integer from as low as -2,147,483,647 up to 2,147,483,647 (one less than plus or minus 2^31). They can remember one character of writing. They can keep a decimal number with a huge amount of precision and a giant range. They can hold a time accurate to the second in a range of centuries. A few bits is not to be scoffed at.
Posted by: Janikin at January 13, 2004 11:01 AMThe rest of our conversion follows a similar vein. Instead of going through line by line, let's just compare end results: when the transition is complete, the code that used to read:
Posted by: Peter at January 13, 2004 11:01 AM