WEEK ELEVEN: COPYRIGHT, COPYLEFT

Aaron Swarz and Lawrence Lessig

Today we listened to lawyer and activist Lawrence Lessig explain a few things  in his 2007 TedTAlk  "Laws that Choke Creativity" .  Lessig is the author of several books, like The Future of Ideas (2001), Free Culture (2004), and Remix: Making Art and Commerce thrive in a hybrid economy (2008) . He has  transformed intellectual property law as a founding member of  Creative Commons, an organization dedicated to building better copyright and copyleft  practices through principles established first by the open-source software community. 
The winner of Creative Commons 2003 moving image contest  is Justin Cone's Building on the Past--licensed as (CC BY), one of the many attributions for their different types of licenses that you can tailor to your specific desires. Watch his movie and see how it works.

Please download Lessig's The Future of Ideas: the fate of the commons in a connected world and READ the preface and PART 1, this will be helpful with concepts and vocabulary for your group presentations next week!

Some other projects and works discussed this week :

Illegal Art: Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age, a visual, audio and video show featuring works that challenged the expansion of copyright law and the policing of creative expression. They distributed CDs and DVDs freely of works that had trouble with copyright infringement--we watched quite a few of those in class, like "State of the Union" (2001) by Brian Boyce, "Gimmee the Mermaid" by Tim Maloney, made after hours at Disney for Bay Area experimental audio collage group Negativland who ran into some serious legal trouble with their record The Letter U and the numeral 2. The argument they claimed was FAIR USE.

The last and earliest piece we watched from the Illegal Art DVD was Todd Haynes' cult classic Superstar, released in 1987 but suppressed for many years. 

You can watch all of them here at The Internet Archive.