Programmers, Not Lawyers, Defining Rights

bhendrickson writes: "Berkeley law professor Lawrence Lessig delivered the most cogent speech I have heard defending the freedoms created by technology and threatened by expanding intellectual property laws. While Lessig's conclusions about napster, packet switching, and antitrust are far from revolutionary for Slashdot, his legal and historical perspective I found compelling. The Mp3 is available directly or as a stream both provided by technetcast ." Great thing to stream while you're at work.

Comments

Programmers and software companies

[L-Train8]

It's not just programmers that are defining rights, its also the corporations that employ the programmers.

Open Source Software is vitally important because it keeps Microsoft from defining the software architecture of the world. If they were able to do this, they would be able to define privacy rights, intellectual property rights, and even free speech rights as they pertain to the internet. Open Source allows anyone to have a voice in shaping those rights.