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Lawrence Lessig Elected to FSF Board of Directors
Free Software Foundation writes "Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig was elected to the Free Software Foundation's Board of Directors on March 28, 2004.
With Eben Moglen, the two most prominent academic legal minds on the subject of copyleft licensing now both serve as Directors of the Foundation.
Professor Lessig's involvement will undoubtedly give a major boost to the FSF's ongoing efforts to neutralize legal threats to software freedom.
The official announcement is here."
I think Lessig is one of the foremost thinkers when it comes to modern intellectual property law. His thoughts are, of course, more evolutionary than revolutionary and closer to the mainstream concepts of IP rights and responsibilities than many of us are aware. His ideas have great impact on the way many of us think about IP law.
However, his ideas are only effective within the walls of academia. He could actually enact through judicial activism many of the concepts and principles that he believes in if he were an actual judge.
Which begs the question, why would an obviously talented legal thinker be passed over time and again for judicial appointments?
I have been pwned because my
Perhaps. But remember that he was on the losing side of the Supreme Court case against the Copyright Term Extension Act.
It certainly can't hurt to get all the assistance we can, so I'm pleased that he's been elected to the FSF Board, but let's not kid ourselves: we're very likely to lose the intellectual property fight -- there are far too many large corporations that are in favor of draconian and one-sided (favorable to them) intellectual property laws, and everyone that matters, including the Supreme Court, favors the large corporations.
Interestingly enough, those very laws are exactly what will keep Microsoft in their monopoly position.
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I think Lawrence Lessig is a marginal person. Someone who is found to be biased against Microsoft in the court can not convince people that what he is saying is the truth. He offers non-commercial license on his site creative commons, but he discourages people from using that license, instead offers the FSF licenses which doesn't have any license that covers non-commercial use. That's very dishonest and assumes that the programmers are nothing but code monkeys producing code. Our code is also creative art and we should have the right to choose our license. This idea that everybody has to release his source under GPL or something complaint is getting to my nerves. Lawrence Lessig is making money out of his writings thus he doesn't see a problem in restricting the use of his work, but we programmers has to release our source code under FSF licenses. That's bullshit.
If you want more info about Lessig losing that big copyright case, you can read his account of it. (very interesting, it half reads like an apology.)
Here, in Lessigs style, is an anecdote (from the 80's) : A Microsoft sales rep messed up a 1.5million dollar deal - so the rep is called in to Gates' office and he says to Gates' "I guess I'm fired, yeh?", Gate's replies: "What? you just learned a big lesson and we footed a 1.5million dollar bill for that lesson - there's no way I'm gonna fire and have some other company gain that experience you just gained."
Lessig is a good smart guy, and FSF/GNU have been doing the impossible for 20+ years now. Lessig lost a failed a big test, there'll be other tests, and he'll try again because he cares about the subject matter.
(yes, this is my second time replying to the parent, the first reply was knee-jerk. This post is hopefully more considered - or at the least, it's longer.)
(bleh, this post needs more thinking, but I should go do something else instead.)
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Because my article is written for, and widely read by music downloaders, I think this section may be the first introduction most p2p users get to the notion that there is a legitimate reason to consider the elimination of copyright: the reason being that the ability to faithfully and cheaply copy digital information yields more benefit to society than the benefit that results from allowing the authors of digital information a monopoly to their work.
While copyright law is a cornerstone to Open Source licensing - without copyrights, licenses would be unenforceable - I think it's pretty clear especially from Richard Stallman's earlier writing that his objective is the elimination of copyright.
Consider that there are far more people who listen to music than who program, or even use computers. If they were all made to understand the benefit to society of cheap, faithful digital copying, maybe we could eliminate, or at least substantially reform copyright.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
So, um... yeah; that would be "not enough evidence" for me. Can you cite a specific quote by Lessig in support of limiting copyright holders' rights over how they license their works? I think you'll have a pretty hard time...