A while ago a lecture by Lawrence Lessig appeared on the internet. In it, Lessig makes the case that the Republicans, invented the internet. By making three important decisions, they encouraged competition and minimized the power of corporations to control or stifle innovation. By giving power to the ‘commons’, opportunity arose for innovators to invent technologies and appliances on top of these ‘free’ physical systems (telephone, internet, the radio spectrum). But will this freedom last?

Lawrence Lessig has long been an activist for ‘Creative Commons’, an alternative copyright system that allows content creators to be more free in how ’strict’ the copyright on their material is. Creative Commons gives others the right to use these materials for their own purposes in various degrees of freedom, rather than lock them out by using the conventional, very strict copyright. The basic idea is that freedom to use existing material, and expand on that (remix, for example), is essential to innovation, and even cultural development.

In this 40-minute lecture, Lessig broadens this concept and speaks of ‘Commons’ in a much more general sense. What’s particularly interesting to me is the way he presents his speech. Rather than just a dry monologue, he uses keywords, graphs, images and video to pepper his speech. This makes the talk easy to follow, much more entertaining, and showcases how presentational software can (and should!) be used.

If you’re tired of the horrible powerpoint presentations you’re usually subjected to, and interested in doing better yourself, I suggest you watch a bit of Lessig’s presentation to get an idea of what’s possible.

If you’re interested in the concept of Creative Commons, and the devastating effect current copyright laws have on creativity, and even culture as a whole, I suggest you watch the entire lecture. If you’re still interested, the book ‘Free Culture’ by the same author goes much more in-depth on the principals behind Creative Commons, and the history of copyright law.

You can download it here (225 mb), or watch it instantly in lower quality.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 24th, 2007 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.