People You Should Know: Larry Lessig
February 29th, 2008 | by Brad King |Larry Lessig has done more than I’m going to talk about in this particular post. If you follow the reading list, you’ll come across him a few times (Code, The Future of Ideas).
He’s here because he made the Creative Commons, the copy left system which allows anyone to make something creative, to protect it from others using it for profit without permission and to allow the creator to set ground rules for how people may use the creation.
It’s really quite a brilliant scheme. This blog, for instance, is protected under the Creative Commons. Anyone can take what I do, remix it, republish it (not for profit) or whatever other scheme they can dream up.
This is a radical idea, I know.
But it’s the foundation of netizens, the people who have populated the Web and the Bulletin Boards and the chatrooms and the MUDs long before the rest of the planet caught up. The idea that information wants to be free isn’t represented in copyright law. Somehow “to promote the useful arts and sciences” stopped being relevant, but making lots of money didn’t.
Copyright law has been extended multiple times, which has had a devastating impact on the Commons.
Lessig saw that and has done something about it. And the concept is what drives much of the social media sphere that exists above traditional media ventures.
