Last Friday, January 8, the University of Amsterdam (I’m with the competition) handed out an honorary doctorate to Harvard prof. Lawrence Lessig, known to you all (I may hope!) as one of the founding members of the wildly successful Creative Commons project. During the acceptance ceremony, he held one of his keynote presentations – and one that is required listening material for everyone. And with everyone – I mean everyone.
There are two very distinct reasons why you should watch, read, and listen to this keynote speech. The most important reason is that Lessig is one of the very few people capable of explaining, with simple examples and straightforward lines of reasoning, what is wrong with copyright today, and where we’ll head if we don’t make any changes. Specifically in this keynote, Lessig speaks about the dangers of imposing a permission-based copyright model on the world of science.
Extremely enlightening, and if you have any form of power or influence within a scientific or educational institution, then please watch this, think about it, and make sure Lessig’s voice gets heard within your institution.
The second, less important reason to listen to a Lessig keynote has little to do with the actual subject matter at hand, but more with style and form. I consider Lessig to be one of the best public speakers in the world, mostly because of his phenomenal ability to blur the line between slide and spoken word. Minimal, fast, but always clear and to the point.
And from a more linguistic perspective, I am insanely jealous of his English, and more specifically, his pronunciation. Crystal clear, sharp, and definitely something I, as a (admittedly, advanced) non-native speaker aspire to.
Without further ado, here’s the keynote. Yes, it’s 50 minutes long, but trust me, these are 50 minutes well-spent. This is the kind of clairvoyant and well-argued criticism on the current restrictive model of copyright that organisations like RIAA and the MPAA are afraid of.
I hope you enjoyed it.
On a slightly related note, how would you feel about OSNews’ content licensed under a CC license? I cannot recall if we (as in, the team) ever discussed this, but it is something that’s been drifting in and out of my attention span over the past few months, but since I’m not a lawyer, I don’t really know if it would be beneficial to anyone. Maybe you guys and girls have anything to say on this topic?
Creative Commons? Or am i wrong?
Yes CC license = Creative Commons license.
Most of the posts in this website are just news. So basically they are link to the actual content post which already have some license. I think to have clear license for posts is important and using CC if you ask me for content like text, movies and pictures is the best but maybe it is important only for 10% of the posts in osnews. Only for posts like Review Litl Webbook ( http://www.osnews.com/story/22671/Review_Litl_Webbook) the license is important.
So if you ask me maybe the license is response to the author of the actual post like David Adams for example. Maybe it will be good idea to add some radio buttons when submitting news/article and maybe to check CC by default.
If you want osnews to be “Open” it has to be Open for everyone even for those who don’t like CC.
Maybe someone will use passages under some other license and maybe he must use “the other license” for the content.
That’s true, and that’s how I would imagine it. I have a similar system at my own website, where I can choose a licence for each blog-post according to the content. I wouldn’t have a problem licencing my own personal writings on OSnews as CC-BY.
Lessig is an academic and, as such, he represents the position that a cooperative model that isn’t hindered by copyright produces optimal advancement for science. But that view is not borne in the real world. Academia doesn’t produce the best drugs. Academia doesn’t produce the best cutting edge medical procedures. Academia doesn’t produce the most modern processors and memory architectures. Those kinds of innovations are generally driven by for-profit activities by entities who invest great sums in developing the IP. If anything, academia is behind the curve. Profit creates the optimal incentive for investment. Certainly, there are many examples where cooperation and collaboration yield significant results, but this set is dwarfed by the number of examples in which restrictive IP is involved. Consequently, I’m not convinced that Lessig’s model will provide any more benefit to mankind. There is no free lunch. People want to get paid for innovating. Sharing in innovation is in the public interest, but only after a period of time after the innovator yields some return on investment. Any other model denies the primary motivators of innovation.
For profit makes us chase one possibility until its painful end, instead of exploring all possibilities.
x86 is not a good architecture, it has simply been made good by sheer weight of momentum.
It’s 2010 and Intel are still struggling with power-to-watt ratios. If RISC, ARM or MIPS had ever had the full weight behind them all these years that Intel have placed behind x86, then we would be on 20 GHz processors, drawing 1 watt of power.
Not at all true. Edison experimented with THOUSANDS of different filaments during the production of the modern bulb before he arrived at his solution.
I don’t agree with your argument, one way or another; because, if it has been “made good”, then it “IS GOOD”.
You say that, having no way of knowing what other roadblocks would have been ahead of RISC, ARM, or MIPS. Regardless, the point is moot.
I would rephrase this as profit can make us chase one possibility until its painful end, instead of exploring all possibilities, but it can also do the opposite. Companies do not innovate for academic achievements or a better world, they simply have a responsibility to their share holders to make profit. This model sometimes leads to hanging on to inferior solutions, but it also sometimes creates great innovations because of large R&D spending companies can do in their search for the next best thing. The question concerning copyright (and patents for that matter) is in the balance between profit and the stimuli to innovate and be creative. One could argue this balance has been lost somewhat, because companies have a large say in the legislative process and they are more concerned about the profit part of the equation than part about being creative and the growing of our culture.
You mean good enough, as in doing things significantly better did not magically result in a large enough profit (or actually return on investment) in the short run. Lots of factors come into play when discussing the way the free market works, but technical superiority has always been pretty low on the list of factors to make something a success. x86 certainly did not win because it was GOOD, it was merely good enough.
Well, we actually do know that these roadblocks did not exist in the technical sense. A modern RISC ISA such as Alpha was better than x86 from an academic perspective, although not by a very large margin as some seem to assume. Alpha’s ISA helped it be the fastest chip all through the 90’s even though they had much smaller design centers and fabrication plants than e.g. Intel had. When the first ARM chips were released they were briefly the fastest chips available, although the original design team consisted of only a handful of people. Nowadays, ARM is still king in performance per watt, even though mighty Intel is a much bigger company with endless amounts of cash.
Nowdays ARM is seen only in devices, where x86 is absolutely unacceptable, while they are more suitable for many desktops then x86 are.
And a good example of a brilliant effort that was killed off by Intel’s and AMD’s IP – Transmeta’s lineup. The mature models were comparable with low-cost Intel’s solutions, and the potential of Cruzoe was high enough. But they just couldn’t stand the IP competition as Transmeta was a lot younger then both competitors.
Not true anymore. These days profit creates the optimal incentive for *short term speculation*.
You mean, like the Internet infrastructure by which we can today have this talk?
Sure, Internet is a small last Century innovation, compared to… AIDS vaccin. Hum? What! We still don’t have an AIDS vaccin!? you kidding, right, with so much profit in sight!?
But expensive lunch are not always the best…
Nope. To cover cost of innovating and, ultimatly, to make profit. History is full of great people who did innovate a lot but wasn’t paid or not that much for it.
Again, an innovator is not necessary an investor. And reciprocally.
You are the one denying that primary motivation of innovation can be anything else than profit.
Considering how much most scientifics get paid, I’ll bet profit is *not* the only motivation.
Or maybe you just confuse innovation with gross. Not the same. Really.
Read your history. The Internet infrastructure wasn’t created by academia (although they like to take credit). It was created by a quasi-military agency (DARPA) funding GE, Bell Labs, MIT, etc.
You’re flogging a straw man. I never argued that.
Sorry to bust your bubble, but most great innovators were profit-driven (Bell, Edison, Wozniak, etc).
No, but the people that pay him ARE investors.
Read what I said: “Any other model denies the primary motivators of innovation.” There are secondary motivators (fame, benevolence, curiosity, etc). But the most attractive model is profit. I’m surprised that anyone would even argue against this point, given the overwhelming evidence supporting this conclusion.
You’re showing your ignorance, first MIT is a university (clue: academia by definition). Secondly, DARPA (or ARPA at the time) is a government agency to found research. Thus the creation of the internet structure was not driven by industry and commercial interest. Thirdly you conveniently omit UCLA, Stanford and the NSF (national science foundation, an academic body), all of which were highly involved in the creation of the internet. And then there’s CERN, which is developed the WWW, the platform almost all commercial activity on the internet is based upon. Again CERN is academic.
So FAIL
I say most of the great innovations of the last century were not driven by profit interest. Lets see, the laser, the optical fibre, the DNA helix, the transistor is a counter-example it’s innovation probably driven by profit interest.
The application and usage of technologies you use today may or may not have been born from some academic endeveour, but I can almost guarentee you that without private investment somewhere along the road, you would not have your computer, monitor, internet, e-mail, you know name it. Academic research only goes so far, at some point in time any idea moves to private industry where the idea becomes a reality. Universities can ponder quantum computers all they want, but you are not going to get a quantum computer to play with until a company like Intel invests hundreds of millions of dollars in developing the idea into real world application. They will not invest one single dime unless they are assured before hand that the investment has safeguards, some of which constitute copyrights and patents. This, in the most simplest of terms, is how the world works. You can argue all you want that academic research should be free and open so long as the resources expended was their own (well actually ours since taxpayers pay for it, and believe me it is people such as myself who are paying a hell of a lot more in taxes than some college kids). But applying this model to private corporations is just laughably childish.
Oh, nice way to play with chicken and egg paradox.
Several major technologies are right now at work to allow us to have this talk. In order a web browser, a compliant HTML engine, HTTP layer, mostly Unix-derivated servers and TCP/IP protocol. Tell me which profit-driven private investors where vital to make any of them?
TCP/IP and first internet infrastructure was mostly funded by US public taxpayers.
When AT&T finally made Unix available to universities and commercial firms and US gov, remember which from academia or private sector was the first one to use and enhance it? Who remember ISC, the first commercial vendor of Unix, major contribution to this operating system?!
Unix didn’t start to evolve from Bell Labs pet projet before Ken Thompson spent a year as professor at UCB.
HTTP & HTML was funded by taxpayers of the many nations who invest each year in CERN researches.
Finally, I don’t know for you but both my Web browser and the HTML engine it’s based on come from an open-source project driven by the will of their members to work on it for free.
I don’t see that much profit-driven innovations at work in these technologies.
Without them, we will have computers, monitors & co indeed, but several private networks (MSN, Compuserve, french Minitel – ouch!), ignoring each others, non interoperable.
Graham Bell primary motivation was more driven by helping deaf people – among which his mother and his wife – by experimenting several hearing devices than by profit.
Edisson was, no doubt, driven by profit *and* innovation.
Wozniak, one of the greatest innovator!? Oh please.
What happend to the father of modern computing, Alan Turing?! Of all the people who participated to shape modern computing, he had clearly a far keyish role than Wozniak. First while at Princeton University on his universal Turing machine still fundamental in algorithms, second while breaking Enigma and like secret codes during WWII. Last but not least, while working at UK’s National Physical Laboratory.
Not so much profit-driven primary motivation in the father of computing, sorry. But public funds, war and academia.
Doesn’t make the innovator automatically and primary profit-driven either. And most probably far less than the investor, for which it’s the primary motivation to invest, *by definition*.
Maybe because you don’t read either what I said: I contest your argument that profit is the primary motivators of innovation.
In several major innovation cases, profit was a secondary motivators. Laser invention comes to mind, for example. The Web. Even Bell’s phone was.
In several others counter-examples, the profit motivation is way bigger than the will to innovate, and there is countless of private companies in this World Economy who do not have any will to innovate at all (cost too much in R&D) but just keep their existing products on the market for as long as possible, sometimes even using monopolistic trick, making secret alliance with competeting companies to keep any new products off the market and current ones artificially expensive. Guess what, that exactly what patents does too, but legally.
Profit don’t drive the innovation. Innovation can be a tool for making profit, and in the last century was considered an effective one, due to residual industrial economy. In the last couple of decade, many switch to a better mean to the same goal: financial speculation. The object of speculation (innovating or not, usefull or not) doesn’t matter anymore.
Today, knowledge sharing drive innovation more and more, while profit dump innovation for short-term speculation, and/or for market control to block others to innovate too much, via patents.
You are doing exactly that which Lessig warns about: using a paradigm case as a universal case.
Simple example: if you truly believe that the MPAA/RIAA model works for scientific content, then I presume you never have experienced the sheer frustration of not having access to articles you REALLY REALLY need for your thesis.
On top of that, your view is very Western. I live in one of the wealthiest nations of the world, and I attend a top-notch university with loads of money in the bank. For us, getting access to scientific content is relatively straightforward: we pay up.
However, in most of the rest of the world, this is not the case. I find it appaling – nay, disgusting, barbaric, and utterly idiotic – that poorer countries to not have access to the knowledge we have gathered.
Furthermore, the idiotic situation here is that the people producing scientific content do not do it for the money – as you seem to imply. No, they do it for recognition, for citations, for positive peer review. The publishers are the ones profiting off the backs of scientists. The financial incentive you wax so lyrically about does NOT foster the advancement of science – it only serves to fill the pockets of people with no scientific interest whatsoever.
When my master’s thesis is done, it will be included in my university’s database of files. However, I will license my thesis under CC, including the data I gather, and I hope they will respect that.
Once you leave the ivory tower, Thom, you’ll realize that you don’t live in the real world. You can’t pay peoples’ salaries without retaining some measure of control over the intellectual property for whatever it is that you produce. I don’t care whether you’re producing drugs, hardware, software, etc. Give all that away to the Third World, and all of the innovation and advantage that you were previously driving will evaporate and/or migrate toward your competitors. Why? Because people like to eat and put a roof over their heads. Let’s see how “barbaric” these people are, if you had to choose between collecting a paycheck and giving your work away for free. So, why do you expect others to do what you’re not willing to do?
Uhm, I’m talking about scientific materials. You know, research that is produced by, well, universities. Scientific content ought to be accessible to everyone. The goal of science is not to amass wealth – scientists work for recognition. A good scientist would be thrilled to see his work built upon by other parties – no matter where they are from, because it means their work is sound.
That’s fine and dandy so long as the resources used are their own. But when Intel funds research, that research does not exist regardless until they enter the picture, otherwise you academia could have just done it yourself. Additionally, Intel is not going to invest hundreds of millions each year to the salaries of their own scientists without insuring that said scientists are not going to take off with the findings and give them to AMD freely. You see Intel would not even have the money in the first place until investors come along and purchase their stocks, knowing full well that Intel will safeguard their IP.
The problems most of these countries face have nothing to do with financial resources to pay some fees for research. Good lord, they face much greater problems with internal ethnic divisions, corruption, lack of natural resources, and a whole host of other issues. It is almost laughable to think that third world nations just simply need to access scientific research and all is good. Do you even realize that most nations would not use any data regardless? This is not even considering the vast amount of material that is open and freely available to scientists all over the world. But sorry to say, Egypt has absolutely no use into the R/D spent by Intel
Edited 2010-01-12 10:56 UTC
You mean poor countries like china who are exploiting western technology and causing western people losing jobs.
Bollocks, go out and see poor people waiting in snow for food. Your and Lessig view is typical academic tower speech, it’s easy preach when your belly is full and money comes from goverment. Most of science today is funded by companies not goverments. You never been poor and unemployed, dealing with bills and social service stuff. You view western world as it was some f–king paradise without troubles, but that is just typical academic bullshit. When you work 45 hours per week on low payment and pay almost 40% of that in taxes, hearing some preaching on guy who gets payment on those money makes me sick.
Most studies should be sponsored by corporates, not goverments. This would allow more money to spend on tax reductions and dealing social problems. Wake up its not f–king fairyland out there.
The world isn’t black and white.
Between us (disproportionally rich) and them (very, very poor, hunger), there’s this whole other world that actually makes up the bulk of the planet. These are countries without hunger or war, but also countries who simply aren’t rich enough to pay the ridiculous fees to get access to scientific content – content their universities need to educate their people on an internationally competitive level.
I could not agree with this more. Thom, please do get back to us in 10 to 20 years outside of the world of academia and tell us your opinion then. I say this gently as I can, but you simply do not have a shred of credibility on this subject, and your opinion is ignorant at best, fanciful idiocy at worst. There are things in this world that just are, and things we wish them to be. The latter and the former simply do not always mesh.
The reason why should not be difficult at all to understand. If academia wants to spend their time and resources on research, they are free to do with it want they want. But in no scenario can this ever be transplanted to the outside world, as the time and resources used in the academia world comes from where? Complete short sightedness, absolutely no different than the fanboys who defend vehemently sites like Pirate Bay without looking beyond 10 feet.
Why all the anger? Mind you that outsourcing jobs is a process which involves not only the Chinese government, but international corporations which seek the cheapest place to produce products. Consumers can vote with their wallet, but never seem to do so. I wonder why.
Going back to copyright, I think it is not entirely illegitimate that countries like China more or less ignore international copyright agreements. In this phase of their development it is just not in their best interest to ‘pay up’. This is even more the case with patents, which can be used to keep the undeveloped countries down.
So I do not agree with your ‘exploiting western technology’ assertion, I think it is quite the opposite and we, the western world, are more or less exploiting the people of China (with help of their undemocratic government) who in some cases have to work 90 hours a week for almost nothing, while the profits of the operation flows back to international businesses and the consumers in the west. Granted, development of China has to start somewhere and in the big picture us exploiting them will hopefully lead to a more prosperous China in the long run.
It was proven more than 100 years ago that free trade benefits everyone in the long run. The short time downside is that some has to loose their jobs in order for the reallocation of resources to work.
As for the “western people” loosing their job, what about the “Chinese people” loosing their job in the process as well? A Chinese farmer may find that the water for his field has been diverted so that electricity can be generated instead, so he looses his job. It sucks to be Chinese because of all this free trade they loose their jobs….
The upside is that new jobs has been created because of this reallocation, why don’t you focus on the general benefits rather than the specific disadvantages instead.
In music the ratio of amateurs to professionals are 100 : 1 the laws benefit the 1% to the detriment of the 99% in that specific field. What good could come out of releasing the creativity of 99% of the practitioners in a given field like music? Well who knows?
What about giving chinese engineers a chance to improve the light-bulb or whatever? should they be excluded because of a domestic US policy to improve the life of a few “rights holders” to the detriment of us all?
In fact copyright law has turned our culture into a commercial culture, where commercialism is valued much higher than other aspects. If you are not commercial you are invisible in today’s culture and that is a sad state of affairs. Our culture and our lives are being destroyed by “special interest groups” and it’s got to change.
You shoot yourself in the foot by designing worthwhile drugs, only to make them unavailable and highly cost prohibitive by securing government granted monopolies. These monopolies by their very nature eliminate competition (and collaboration) that makes a free market tick.
It’s a self defeating cycle. What good are wonderful drugs when they are exponentially more expensive then what people can reasonably afford, and only allowed to be produced, manufactured, and even improved upon by a tiny group of government backed central planners – whoever the patents holders happen to be. You waste millions of dollars of taxpayer money on such a system and then incorporate much more then that as legal fees into the cost of products. We’re talking huge, enormous amounts of wasted money, and more often then not, decades of wasted time, on products that end up being overpriced and limited to specific areas, out of reach by most who could otherwise benefit from them.
Case in point, a cement based insulation known as airkrete, developed many years ago, is 100 percent fire proof, termite proof, rot proof, non toxic, has exceptional R value, and can be pumped into wall cavities without much defacement. It’s outstanding. If it weren’t for the government / monopolistic powers, we’d likely see this material becoming commonplace (via any company who wants to startup a business in the material) and replacing fiberglass, styrofoam, and cellulose, as further innovation and manufacturing plants pop up spontaneously, without threats of legal action. This would drive prices down and increase availability many times over, worldwide. As it is, “airkrete” is only marketed by a single company on the northeast US coast. It’s also produced on a limited scale which means it costs anywhere between 60 to 80 cents per inch per square foot, or roughly a whopping $15,000 to $20,000 for a mere 2500 square foot roof (10 inch thickness). Great ideas often become ludicrously cost prohibitive and and scarce in supply when government granted monopolies forbid their creation and manipulation by anyone but a select few.
Being against the concept of patents (or any kind of IP) is not being anti-profit. It’s that simple. Don’t make the mistake of thinking so one-dimentitonally; thats a false dichotomy.
If somebody can take an idea, and implement it better, cheaper, faster, or improve upon it in any way (without lying or committing fraud), why let the big guns step in and prevent them from doing so?
There were several parts of the presentation I did not like. The professor seems to be basking in his own intellectual glory, too often using funky words and sentences where simple ones would suffice. I got the just of what he was saying, and I suppose if you drew a line in the sand we would be on the same side. But his angle and perspective seem pretty warped by whatever academic philosophy he’s lives within, whereas my arguments are more about being down to earth and pragmatic. He seems to have a different fuel burning his fire.
Edited 2010-01-12 01:12 UTC
There are many examples where academia has produced results. How do you think Cisco got started?. RSA security? PGP? BGP?
Edited 2010-01-12 10:21 UTC
Sorry I have to say that, but you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about and how the real world works.
In the real world companies have almost all the significant research done by academia and paid by the taxpayer. Only once a research topic reaches a stage where it is very close to be commercially viable does industry latch on. Research is to the largest degree driven by academia not industry. Yes industry is doing research, however this is almost always “engineering” research i.e. not fundamental, which is where the real discoveries are being made.
Furthermore industrial research is to a large degree funded by academic research grants, i.e. research grants paid by the taxpayer. They are not paying themselves for the research.
Can someone provide the url to mp4/ogv version of this speech?
As far as I understand, here it is: http://blip.tv/file/get/Ccnl-KeynoteLarryLessig288.m4v
I am sorry for off-topic comment, but I don’t really know the place for it.
I don’t have flash plugin installed (for my own kind-a religeous reasons).
Several recent posts contain embedded video. While the most often case is Youtube, I can easily get the video by ID with any of numerous tools. But in this particular case I have not only to review the source of the page to find an embedded link (as always) but also to go to blip.tv and hunt for this clip, as the link ID of this video returns me swfplayer, and simple substitution in arbitry clip’s path leads me to “Not Found” page.
Could You please be so kind to include a link to the video next time?
Sorry for off-topic comment once again.
Edited 2010-01-12 13:49 UTC
I have a degree in Languages and Literature and as far as I can say his english does have an accent, and it’s very clear he is not a native speaker of that language. Either I am expecting too much from him or the dutch language is much more problematic as a bridge to learn other non-similar languages, that you have found his speech miraculously perfect.
No he does not speak received pronunciation and it is also clear that he his not a native speaker of English.
But not being a native English speaker, or not having a native English accent does not make it impossible to have a nice accent. Maybe the opposite is even true.
I like his accent too, it seems to take the best of British English (a much larger collection of vocals) and American English
He IS a native speaker of English. He’s born and raised in the US.
That’s funny, luckily I did not dissect his accent even more
I always was jealous of the (sadly fictional) accent of Arnaud DeFöhn in the C-series Invisible Man.
I didn’t say his English was perfect. I said it was crystal clear and sharp.
Probably no-one will read this since I am posting 2 days late,
But In my resarch on the subject, I found that the most troubling aspect of copyright to be the length of time. For this we may thank teh morons who contrived the Berne copyright conventions, and I may thank the thieves and politicians who brought it the the USA.
As much as the publishers or authors guild talk about “protecting the creator”, all copyright (under the current regime) will outlast all of its creators, to then be “owned” and wielded by an entity that had NOTHING to do with the creation of the work and is in no way “incented” to create more work, but is completely driven by ideas like suing artists who included a line from “happy birthday” or “the kookaburra song”.
I’d love to leave copyright just as it is, but shorten it to 14 years (the term of the original copyright in America, and of the british statute upon which it was modelled). Statistically that is well beyond the length of time when copyright is still profitable in its original form, leaving plenty of time to try to get movie deals and graphic novelizations.