Lessig at Educause 2009: CC for science and education

Duration: 5 minutes and 23 seconds

Country: United States

Language: English

License: CC - Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives

Genre: Instructional

Producer: Lawrence Lessig

Director: Lawrence Lessig

Views: 57 (2 embedded)

Posted by: calmansi on Dec 20, 2009

Excerpt from Lawrence Lessig's "It Is About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright Right" talk at Educause 2009, in which he presents Creative Commons projects for science and education. For full video recordings of his talk, see http://blogs.uct.ac.za/blog/oer-uct/2009/11/12/getting-our-values-around-copyright-right by Michael Paskevicius (mpaskevicius on YouTube). This excerpt begins at 0:39:05 of the video of the complete talk (1). This excerpt - as the whole of Lawrence Lessig's talk at Educause 2009 - is under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ license. (1) There is also a comple audio podcast of Lawrence Lessig's talk: http://www-cdn.educause.edu/sites/default/files/e09-lessig-session.mp3

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Then in 2005, we launched the Science Commons project, which wanted to focus the same kind
of insight in the context of science. How do we lower the transaction cost for scientists
to share their work? How do we build an infrastructure to enable that voluntary sharing? So we wanted
to be part of the Open Access movement in scholarship, and an extraordinary number of
journals now use our licenses, a thousand journals do make their content freely available
under the terms of Open Access licenses. We then have open data project, which is more
complicated, because data isn't technically, in the United States, protected by copyright,
so we wanted to build a legal infrastructure, to enable any of the complexities around sharing
data - these unnecessary legal restrictions that creators of data believe surround their
data. And that infrastructure was a protocol, we called it CC 0. Basically, it's a simple
way for creators or scientists to waive any possible right or claim they might have to
this underlying data. And then to complement that legal infrastructure
with a technical infrastructure to enable sharing - and we've been one of the most important
forces behind the RDFa standard which, when it matures and gets embedded in the infrastructure
around us, will enable a much more intelligent way for these entities to share and make knowledge
accessible. And then we have extended out of the virtual
world into the physical world, into the open material space, to enable stuff to be more
easily shared. So we have this Material Transfer Agreement, which is like a Creative Commons
license, that enables anybody in the same 3-layer to facilitate the sharing of the stuff,
the mice or whatever else you're producing, without the enormous cost that are typically
layered on top, of lawyers insisting upon controll of everything in the future.
The aim of this project here, is simply to simplify voluntary sharing here. And one of
the most dramatic examples of this is this launch of the Personal Genome project. I don't
know if you know, with this project we are going to get volunteers, put them through
this enormously rigorous test, to make sure they understand what they are volunteering
for. You literally have to get a perfect score on the online exam that they give you. If
you don't get a perfect score, you can't be considered a volunteer. These volunteers volunteer
to make their gene sequence information completely available for anybody to do anything with
it that they want. Now, not everybody would want to opt into this, but certain important
leaders in science have done this, and more than a thousand volunteers have been cleared
and not yet processed here. But what will be made available is 3 bits of free stuff
things. #1: complete gene sequence for these people. #2: medical information for these
people. They will give interviews that will report the whole of their medical history
in a way that can be used by science. And 3: stem cells; real stem cells that will be
made accessible for anybody to get access to accordint to a protocol. And all 3 of these
layers are now made accessible under a CC-like infratructure. So the gene sequence is CC
0, no restriction on it at all; medical information CC 0 no restriction on it at all; the stem
cells are governed by a Material Transfer Agreement that facilitates the simple sharing
of this information, in a way that will explode information around this gene sequence information.
Open Learn Finally, in 2007, we launched CC learn, the
objective of which was to coral or herd the cats (?) of the Open Education resources movement,
to hepl build an infrastructure of interoperable free educational resources, so that the ideal
of Open Education, which so many in this room, I know, have taken an enormous role in helping
to push, can become a reality, can become a part of education around the world, as people
can take valuable resources and do stuff with it.
Now, I spent this long time telling you about this enterprise, Creative Commons, because
you - you geeks especially - have a critical role to play here. What you need to become
is a kind of radical, militant activists in spreading the infrastructure necessary for
this infrastructure of freedom to succeed. This is code for sanity. Tha's what the Creative
Commons envisions, and you need to participate in building that code. Because of course,
the educators or scientists have more important things to do than to worry about exactly how
the RDFa is being embedded inside the infrastructure that marks their content freely, so others
can share it. You need to build that, so that it's simple for them to play by the rules
of the different ecology that is the norms or practices that we should be aspiring to.
OK, that's changing norms and practices.