Lessig at educause 2009: Creative Commons

Duration: 4 minutes and 48 seconds

Country: United States

Language: English

License: CC - Attribution

Genre: Instructional

Producer: Lawrence Lessig

Director: Lawrence Lessig

Views: 96 (7 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 the Creative Commons project and explains the CC licenses. 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 0:34:26 of the video of the complete talk. This excerpt - as the whole of Lawrence Lessig's talk at Educause 2009 - is under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ license. NB There is also an audio podcast of the talk: http://www-cdn.educause.edu/sites/default/files/e09-lessig-session.mp3

Report this video as offensive

Translate and Transcribe

Sign In/Register for dotSUB to translate this video.

Share

Embed Video
Embed normal player
Embed a smaller player
Advanced Embedding Options
Embedding Options

Size:

Language:

Embed Code
Embed transcript
Embed transcript in:
Invite a user to dotSUB

Your invitation to join dotSUB was successful

There was an error inviting that user to dotSUB

Video Transcription

Show in new window

...and think about what else we could be doing.
So, the second thing we could be doing is thinking about how to change norms, our norms,
our practices. And that, of course, was the objective of
a project a bunch of us launched about 7 years ago,the Creative Commons project. Creative
commons project has as its ideal identifying simple ways, giving authors simple ways to
mark their content with the freedoms they intended their content to carry. So rather
than the All Rights model of Britney Spears, this is a kind of Some Rights Reserved model,
where you signal clearly: "The freedoms you have with my creative work, and the restrictions
that I continue to insist upon." So the freedoms could be the freedom to share the work, to
remix the work, or both. And the restrictions you are allowed to impose - you can say: "You
can do it for non commercial purposes", or you can say: "You can only do it if you share
alike", meaning you give others the freedom that you inherited, or you can post both restrictions.
You add these freedoms and restrictions together and you get a bunch of licenses: there are
6 licenses, they all come in three layers. So one of the layers here is a human readable
commons deed: a deed that expresses, in terms everybody should understand, the freedoms
and restrictions associated with that creative work.
Second and very different, is a lawyer-readable license (audience laughs) a billion-page document,
written by the very best lawyers we could find, to make enforceable the freedoms associated
with this content. And third, and ultimately in my view, most
important: a machine-readable expression of the freedoms that are associated with this
content, so that machines can begin to identify the freedoms that run with particular bits
of content and make it easier for education - educators and scientists and artists to
gather content on the basis of the freedoms that it carries. And so Yahoo and Google both
now have built into their search engines the ability to filter content on the basis of
these freedoms. When you enable this kind of a collage, you
get a certain kind of creativity that is, in my view, the celebration, the very best
kind of celebration, of a kind of the kind of Romantic vision that Souza was talking
about. This is still my favorite example of that: this is a song written by an artist,
Colin Mutchler, he called it "My Life" - guitar track he uploaded to a free site that
allowed other people to download it under a Creative Commons license. 17-year old violist
named Cora Beth downloaded it, added the violin track you here on top here, renamed the song:
"My Life Changed", and then re-uploaded it for other people to do with it as they want,
there has been a whole bunch of remixes of these. Some of them are great, some are a
little bit embarassing, like the Japanese one, "My Life Changed", absolutely rich, you
know, showing off (?). But the critical point to recognize is that these creators could
create, consistent with copyright law, without any lawyer standing between them. And that's
the objective here: to enable people to respect the underlying rights which copyright enables
them and grants them, without requiring the high costs of intervention that lawyers always
will impose on the respect of those rights.
So we launched this in 2002, and since that time, there has been an explosion of licenses,
creative objects out there in the world marked with these license. An extraordinary range,
over 100 million images now at Flickr, Radiohead released a song, #1 song on Amazon that was
licensed under a Creative Commons license, Girl Talk is a big supporter here, and Nine
Inch Nails released an album under a Creative Commons license: within the first week, they
made 1.6 million dollars on free music that was available for people to dowload for free.
Because they had recognized the importance of bringing the audience upstage, and they
were rewarded for that. Al Jazeera, amazingly, makes all of their video now, of the Middle-East,
available under a Creative Commons license, so anybody can incorporate it into news shows
and commentary around the world. The White House has put the White House content under
a Creative Commons license. And of course, last year, Wikipedia re-licensed the whole
of Wikipedia under a Creative Commons license, to build this infrastructure of interoperable
free culture that speaks to a different business model of creativity.