Slashdot Mirror
Lawrence Lessig's Personal Past and Supreme Court Future
Slyfox writes "Ever wonder how Lawrence Lessig became one of the most notable figures in the fight over free speech and intellectual property on the internet? Wired has an excellent article about Lawrence Lessig's life; it beginings with his start as a right-wing Republican, and continues by following the events of his life through law school, contributing to the Microsoft anti-trust case, and becoming a top cyberlaw expert. The article describes both his successes and failures, and it forshadows Lessig's biggest challenge yet: arguing Eldred v. Ashcroft before the US Supreme Court in October."
The article was not excellent. It was designed to marginalize him and turn him into a crazy guy tilting at government windmills. The headline in the print edition said Lessig wants to "smash" the copyright system. That's just plain false. He's a big believer in copyright-- he just doesn't want it to last forever. He wants there to be some balance between the public's rights and the copyright holder's rights. He's got a good compromise system that would force people to renew their copyrights if they were still valid. If people renewed, they would still get all of the protections today, but if they didn't the work would fall into the public domain. This is a great help for researchers, librarians and everyone else who needs to find a copy of something that's out of print. Did you realize that it's illegal to make a copy of something that's out of print? Yup. You could stilll get sued for $150,000 per copy! This proposals is just another dose of sanity for the system.
Wired didn't care about any of this. They didn't even mention it. They just painted him as a bit of a nutcase. Remember this is the same author (Steven Levy) who wrote a glowing review of the M$ Paladium system. Beware!