This episode features an interview with Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, co-director of the law school’s Center for Internet and Society, author of “Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity” and founder of Creative Commons. In this conversation Professor Lessig, with a focus on photography, discusses the purpose & objective of Creative Commons, his perspective on copyright law, addresses the question “How if at all the adoption of Creative Commons is hurting photographers? and shares more information about the recently announced CC+ license.
EXIF and Beyond: Lawrence Lessig Interview
January 1st, 2008 · 2 Comments
Category: Uncategorized
2 responses so far ↓
Nelcha // Jan 2, 2008 at 3:13 am
The ONLY valid points that were NOT made here were that sites like Flickr should be Right-click disabled and NOT leave the cookie jar OPEN! and that EVERY © is valid and does NOT have to be complicated. A Thief KNOWS they should ask and NOT steal. Period!
Lane Hartwell // Jan 2, 2008 at 5:36 am
Thanks Jim, for taking the time to interview Lessig. Good work!
A few thoughts:
1. Lessig said: Lessig: “…when they steal a CC photograph, there is a fight, because there is a CC community that gets together and says “this is outrageous”.
Where was the CC community in Bubblegate? There was quite a bit of stolen CC content in that video and no one said a peep. The CC Community should have been just as pissed off as the ARR Community.
2. He says that we live in this culture of people wanting things in one or two clicks and not wanting to take the time to read detailed language relating to copyright. Yet, CC has more confusing wordiness than ARR. Like, how many different licenses there are, what they mean, etc. Not to mention the fact that sites like flickr neglect to inform people that the licenses are irrevocable. I agree with Scott Baradell who wrote the piece “Why photographers hate Creative Commons” for http://rising.blackstar.com/why-photographers-hate-creative-commons.html when he says that the easiest, simplest way to handle this is to mark a work ARR and then to specify the terms you would like to have it used under. If someone contacts you and asks to use a photo for free, you can grant them the right. Once CC is granted, there IS no turning back and a photographer has lost his rights forever to those images.
3. Most people don’t understand copyright and the legalities of obtaining model releases, etc. So your average flickr photographer licenses images of other people under CC thus giving away rights without consulting the people pictured, as in the case of Virgin Mobile in Australia.
4. I’m just curious, under what authority does Lessig have to develop CC as a system of licensing?
I’m not anti CC, but I think it’s deeply flawed and very confusing.
Leave a Comment