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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 still think that Eben Moglen sounds like the beginning of that Def Leppard song.
I get nothing from the new guy. 'cept maybe "Less sig, more post"? On that note, I depart.
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
My hats off to Anybody who can find a way to score a +5 Funny off of this article.
continue to do nothing except "advocate" free software
Evidently spoken by someone who uses free software like it was some kind of naturally happening thing...
If not for the FSF, and Eblen amd RMS and the other, you might be posting your drivel with some non-free software, because some corporation would have managed to squash free software in order to grab more marketshare.
I wish people like you were less ingrate and remembered whom you owe having the choice of running free software in the first place to.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
They want their mindnumbingly boring story back.
Lessig's latest book, Free Culture, is available online for free (both as in speech and as in beer). It was reviewed on Slashdot two weeks ago. I haven't read it yet, but I've read one of his earlier books, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, and thought it was excellent.
Lessig is definitely not in the "all software should be Free" camp. He tends more to suggest that we should continue to feed the public domain, which means shorter copyrights, not the elimination of them.
So really, he's much more moderate than RMS, so having him on the board should likely make the FSF a little more Congress-friendly.
...will be in the courts. We see it with Linux and SCO, and that won't be the last major court battle over free software. Free software (and open source, for those that worry about that distinction) has proven that it's up to snuff technically. And intelligent people can disagree over ease-of-use compared to commercial products.
But the one area where proprietary software really has had free software outclassed is in legal muscle. Of course, some companies (Novell, IBM, HP for a few) have supported free software because they stand to benefit from it. But free software needs as many sharp legal experts as it can get--that will support free software for the sake of free software. It's nice to see that this is happening.
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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I don't think of Lessig as an absolutist like Stallman, he's an intellectual and academic, and academics generally spend too much time thinking and analyzing to have such a black-and-white view of the world. He's taken a stand to protect the very existence of concepts like the public domain. Yes, Creative Commons offers more flexibility in licensing format than the FSF offerings, but that's done in the domain that Lessig knows. I'd love to see the FSF become as warm and fuzzy and accepting as Creative Commons is, and I have no reason to believe that Lessig won't help with that process.
Over the years Lessig has always been the goto guy for comments putting the FSF actions and announcements in a digestible context. Now that he is officially part of the organization he won't be able to provide an objective opinion. Is that a gain or a loss?