Thursday, August 16th, 2007 - 7:30PM The Home of Lawrence Bender
Bel Air, CA
Copyright is one of the most powerful drivers of economic growth and human advancement. It gives credit to artists, engineers, scientists, and business people for original work and it gives them the ability to make money off of their creative inventions. It is so central to the economic model of the entertainment industry that our industry simply wouldn’t exist if copyright didn’t allow us to hold the exclusive right to the works we create.
In our new digital world, when replication is becoming increasingly easy, the ability to enforce copyright is becoming more difficult. Digital technologies are making it easier to remix and modify creative works for both art and commercial enterprise. While the MPAA and RIAA crack down on illegal file-sharing by firms like Kazaa and Napster, Lawrence Lessig is focused on creating a new, more flexible form of copyright to ensure that the new capabilities brought on by the digital era are not lost.
In 2001, Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford Law Professor and the founder of Stanford’s Center for Internet & Society, launched Creative Commons, a new model that enables copyright holders to grant some of their rights to the public while retaining others.
His new system is being widely adopted by individuals and institutions around the world. Just last month, Microsoft incorporated a version of his copyright licenses as an additional plug-in for Microsoft Office so you can even use them when you create original work using Powerpoint, Word, and Excel. Many popular photo and video websites such as Flickr have started integrating Creative Commons licenses into their work flow. On August 15th, Lawrence will fly down from San Francisco to give us a presentation on the benefits of the innovative contracts he has developed and will we will analyze their application for Hollywood's products.
Additional Biography:
Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and a Professor at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court. Professor Lessig represented web site operator Eric Eldred in the ground-breaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. He has won numerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation's Freedom Award, and was named one of Scientific American's Top 50 Visionaries, for arguing "against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online."
Professor Lessig is the author of Free Culture (2004), The Future of Ideas (2001) and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999). He chairs the Creative Commons project, and serves on the board of the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Public Library of Science, and Public Knowledge.
Professor Lessig earned a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a JD from Yale.
Professor Lessig teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, contracts, and the law of cyberspace.