Wireside Chat With Lawrence Lessig 52
An anonymous reader writes "Lawrence Lessig, the foundational voice of the free culture movement, will deliver a talk on fair use, politics, and online video from Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You'll be able to tune in to a live webcast. The lecture by Lawrence Lessig will last 45 minutes, and will be followed by a 30 minute interactive Q & A session. The event will be moderated by Elizabeth Stark of the Open Video Alliance. Questions can be submitted using the hashtag #wireside. This is a talk about copyright in a digital age, and the role (and importance) of a doctrine like 'fair use.' Fair use allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, and is essential for commentary, criticism, news reporting, remix, research, teaching and scholarship with video. As a medium, online video will be most powerful when it is fluid, like a conversation. Like the rest of the internet, online video must be designed to encourage participation, not just passive consumption. Tune in here on February 25th, 6:00pm US Eastern time (see more time zones), or check out our screening events in cities across the world."
fair use: use it or lose it (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're in a country such as the U.S. that has fair use or something similar, it's important to assert your right to use it. Over the last 50 years, copyright law has been relentlessly shifting in favor of copyright owners, to the point where a lot of people don't realize that fair use even exists.
As an example, I teach at a community college, and at our fall convocation a couple of years back, they passed out brochures put out by a publishers' association about how it's totally illegal to sell course packs without getting permission and paying royalties. The school officials who agreed to pass it out apparently had no clue that fair use existed. If you put a complete short story by Hemingway in a course pack, then, yeah, you're probably not covered by fair use. But if you take a single graph out of a scientific paper and put it in a course pack, then you're absolutely covered by fair use.
It's just like any other freedom. If we want fair use to remain viable, we have to (a) realize it exists, and (b) have the guts to use it.
His Idea on copyright law (Score:2, Insightful)
He made a comment basically stating that he would be OK if copyright law was something like 50 years MAX, but where after the first 5 years, you would have to reassert yourself, and if you didn't it would become public domain.
I will assume that he means EVERY 5 years you would have to reassert yourself.
I would think the Gov't (US specifically) would be all on board with this idea, considering it could mean the Entertainment industry would be writing them a big fat check every 5 years.
(of course that would probably mean those big fat checks to "supporters" personal banking accounts would stop)
How much is it to copyright a song these days?