Last week I ran into a TED talk by ‘the Net’s most adored lawyer’ Larry Lessig. This Stanford professor is an authority on copyright issues.


In this presentation he talks about creativity being strangled by the law. In his opinion the ‘old’ laws on property and copyright need to be reviewed and changed.

At the end he mentions Creative Commons for a sec, but the TED rules do not allow him to talk about it any further, therefore I’ll try to finish his talk with a little publicity for the Creative Commons, or ’some rights reserved’ license.

“Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control — a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which “all rights reserved” (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy — a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation — once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally — have become endangered species. Creative Commons is working to revive them. We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare “some rights reserved”.”

I personally like this idea and therefore agree with Larry on reviewing the copyright laws and to give people more freedom to express themselves in a creative way.

Today I ran into another interesting speech. This time by Yochai Benkler. (Nice beard!). He talks about how Open source projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization.

“By disrupting traditional economic production, copyright law and established competition, they’re paving the way for a new set of economic laws, where empowered individuals are put on a level playing field with industry giants.”

These online communities and projects are still growing and getting more powerful everyday. Maybe, within a few years, the crowd will change the copyright laws themselves because the government and larger companies are struggling and, already, losing against this revolution?