Below is Lawrence Lessig’s keynote at last week’s Educause 2009: “It’s About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright.” This 60 minute presentation is well worth the time of anyone who’s interested how antiquated copyright laws are impacting ecologies of freedom, access, education, and science in the digital age. After delineating how we got to where we are, he advocates that rather than reforming existing laws, we instead challenge them by building alternative structures that will more flexibly, appropriately, and ethically govern information use. Technologists and educators have specific and crucial roles in this: technologists must “build the code” for sanity by making it easier for others to effectively play by new rules, and educators must perform and encourage in our students skepticism towards rules that simply no longer make sense.
Also: as always, Lessig provides a captivating model for integrating text, images, and art into a presentation.
I was lucky to be in the audience for this talk, and I have to say it was the highlight of all the sessions at the conference. At the same time, I felt the same emotional ambivalence during Lessig’s talk that I feel when I read his books and articles: first angered by ways the system is broken, then invigorated to be a warrior for What Is Right, then dejected and depressed because the problems are so overwhelming and fundamental. I tweeted heavily through the first part of the session but by the end was feeling too sad and overwhelmed to type much!
That said, the last part of Lessig’s talk is extremely important, as it’s where he lays out what we, as academics and educators and geeks, can do to build a more sensible culture. My moodiness aside, I recommend the talk as well!
Thanks for posting this. I have used an older talk by Lessig in teaching, and maybe I will switch to this very current one. I only have only had time to start watching it, but it looks useful and very clear in outlining his ideas.