Lawrence Lessig may run for Tom Lantos’s seat

Comment 1 by Barry Parr  on  Feb 21  at  9:53am  •  All my comments • 

Larry Lessig's work and his book The Future of Ideas influenced a lot of my thinking on copyright and intellectual property. He started the Creative Commons project, which I use to license Coastsider's content.

Coincidentally, his work deeply informed my point of view on MCTV's copyright of public meetings.

Comment 2 by Barry Parr  on  Feb 25  at  9:50pm  •  All my comments • 

Larry Lessig has decided not to run for Tom Lantos's seat.

http://lessig.org/blog/2008/02/onwhyiamnot_running.html

I'm disappointed, but it's an understandable decision.

Lessig's Creative Commons, what might be considered a part of his Free Culture movement, has turned his name into a dirty word among thousands of writers, artists, photographers, and other creative individuals. There is nothing wrong with the current status of copyright, in which anyone who wants to give their creations away may easily do so. But in spite of that, Lessig comes along and muddies the waters with a confusing, multilayered system that only encourages the naive notion among those who can't be bothered with fine print that anything that can be found on the Internet or in any other medium should be free for the taking. For every big copyright-holding corporation he wants to rip off, he hurts tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of struggling, creative, self-employed individuals who have little but copyright to protect the intellectual property they create to put food in their mouths and pay the rent.

To me, he comes off as a pampered abstractionist who has never had to make a living at the professions he would destroy. He has no clue about the economics of creative content, as witnessed in the YouTube video of one of his speeches arguing for kids to freely and legally nab whatever they want for their own projects. His time would be better spent teaching those kids how to use today's technology to create for themselves rather than stealing and cobbling together the creations of others.

I'm glad he's not running. I don't like Speier, but I would have broken my own rule about wasting time on professional politicians and worked for her against Lessig in the primary.

Carl May (owner of a very small stock photo agency)

Comment 4 by Jonathan Lundell  on  Feb 27  at  12:34am  •  All my comments • 

Carl, I'm not following you. I know you can't be arguing that Lessig is forcing artists to use Creative Commons; obviously he can't. So...he's confusing them? That's the problem?

No, Jonathan, Creative Commons is--and is promoted in a manner--that encourages all those who want to freely use any creative work they can lay their hands on to do so. Experience with Flickr and other locations where Creative Commons copyright approaches are employed shows that few bother with the detailed CC language covering that which they want to nab for themselves. No one on the CC side seems to give a damn for what typical creative people need to do to make a living and for the role of copyright in protecting the value of their creations. Lessig says the rights made free by CC releases do not affect the commercial (meaning monetary, I suppose) value of creative works, that the creative works are simply made available for even greater creative explorations. He could not be more wrong, as almost anyone earning a living in the creative world can explain.

Artists are not confused. Neither are the thiefs who want to steal the IP of artists and others whose creative work is protected by copyright. But in the case of the thiefs, they are not confused because they seldom bother themselves with copyright distinctions.

Check out this video if you want to see what a propaganda meister Lessig is. If you can't see the support for his approach he manufactures out of very little and his framing of matters to appeal to a superficial knowledge level, you need to have a broader understanding of copyright as it currently exists. As I have stated elsewhere, Creative Commons is an answer without a problem, so there must be other motivations for it.

Professional artists, photographers, musicians, etc., are not confused by CC--just the opposite if you look at the professional message boards where they whine about this additional threat to the way they make a living. When I mentioned Lessig might run for Congress in my district on a stock photography board, I had an instant three or four messages and additional private e-mails from photographers telling me I had to get political and work against him--as if I didn't already know that. Thankfully, that won't be necessary now.

Carl May

http://br.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q25-S7jzgs