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Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, host of the podcast Another Way, and co-founder of Creative Commons. Lessig has received numerous awards, including a Webby Life Time Achievement Award and the Free Software Foundation's Freedom Award. He is vis mere the author of ten books, including Republic, Lost, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. vis mindre

Includes the name: Lawrence Lessig

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Værker af Lawrence Lessig

Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity (2004) — Forfatter — 1,554 eksemplarer
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999) 651 eksemplarer
Republic, Lost: Version 2.0 (2015) 53 eksemplarer
America, compromised (2018) 33 eksemplarer
Cut: Film As Found Object In Contemporary Video (2004) — Essay — 21 eksemplarer

Associated Works

The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (2008) — Forord — 509 eksemplarer
Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman (2002) — Introduktion — 301 eksemplarer
The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz (2016)nogle udgaver101 eksemplarer
Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia (2010) — Forord, nogle udgaver76 eksemplarer

Satte nøgleord på

business (33) commons (46) computer (18) computers (49) computing (20) copyright (307) creative commons (64) current events (19) cyberspace (23) ebog (39) faglitteratur (288) filosofi (22) free culture (30) freedom (26) government (19) information (20) intellectual property (186) internet (177) IP (38) Kindle (30) kreativitet (59) kultur (117) kunst (23) law (311) legal (22) lessig (28) læst (44) media (57) open source (35) political science (20) politik (110) Skal læses (261) society (38) sociologi (27) tech (25) teknologi (167) ulæst (20) USA (18) økonomi (42) ønskeliste (30)

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Must read for a description of the systemic (NOT personal) corruption destroying American politics. 5 stars for its importance and revelations, 3 for its execution
 
Markeret
emmby | 8 andre anmeldelser | Oct 4, 2023 |
O cara mandou essa em 1999 (!!!!!!!!!):

"P: Como o sr. analisa o caso recente sobre a lei de patentes envolvendo a Amazon?

R: Eles ganharam um monopólio do governo, no qual ficou estabelecido que o governo protegerá o detentor da patente nos próximos 17 ou 20 anos, ao garantir que ninguém mais use sua idéia sem pagar ao dono da patente. Esse é um caso evidente de regulamentação governamental, e o problema é que essa tendência de patentes comerciais no ciberespaço é extremamente perigosa, especialmente para as pessoas fora dos Estados Unidos, porque o que isso implica é que, para usar uma idéia ou uma certa tecnologia no ciberespaço, a pessoa terá de vir para os Estados Unidos e conseguir uma permissão dos detentores da patente.
Assim, pessoas que têm advogados americanos estão numa posição melhor do que as que têm advogados brasileiros. Ou pessoas que têm idéias no Brasil estão em muito mais desvantagem do que pessoas que têm idéias nos Estados Unidos. Portanto esse mercado global torna-se tendencioso em favor dos americanos, o que é bastante perigoso."


To be Read.
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Markeret
RolandoSMedeiros | 17 andre anmeldelser | Aug 1, 2023 |
I am a Lessig fan. That said, I think this was a very good book and would be a good read for anyone interested in intellectual property especially as related to technology.

Two good issues discussed in the text were the idea of the commons verses ownership and the idea of regulation in advance. The first issue discussed the illusion that just because it is better to have some things as property (controlled by the market) it is better to have everything controlled as property. Thus, the illusion continues, more control is always better. Furthermore, the illusion states, if you fight against more control, you are against control completely. Lessig pointed out that this is not the case. We have things owned in common (highways were a common example) and things owned privately. Balance must be achieved even in the physical world. Even more so in the digital world. More so because in the digital world resources have little to no possibility of being used up. Thus, we must consider them as separate from physical property. Ownership will not disappear in the digital world, however, it should not be given a priori; its benefits should be demonstrated by those who want to claim it as property.

The second issue was in response to the fact that many laws and regulations are being made in relation to the expected consequences of new technologies. However, these things limit the use of new technologies and stifle innovation in favor of existing (usually large) companies. The existing parties that are in favor of these regulations thus shift the burden of proving usefulness onto new technologies. Yet if a technology cannot play around in the real world, how is one to determine whether or not there is a use/market for it?

This book is thought provoking and well written. There were some things (mainly the proposed solutions to existing problems) that I felt would have some bugs in implementation, but that did not distract from the book. In fact, they rather prove the point. They were brainstorming, innovation. We cannot know if those methods are right without looking into them more deeply. Similarly, digital technology and intellectual property cannot be treated like physical property. There may be some analogies, but there are also profound differences.
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Markeret
eri_kars | 10 andre anmeldelser | Jul 10, 2022 |
Given all the hype over this book, including the comments I've heard from several people with whom I'm acquainted to the effect that this book changed people's lives or how they thought about things, it is rather disappointing to finish reading it with the same opinion I had after reading the first chapter:

It's pretty damned mediocre.

Lessig appears to have written this book after he read Peter Drahos' text Information Feudalism, which makes the disappointment even sharper, given that the greatest value of Free Culture seems to be his recounting of examples and observations of the problems of an "intellectual property" restrictive culture gone wildly out of control. That's basically the same thing as roughly half the primary value of Information Feudalism but, even with that earlier book to inspire and guide him, Lessig's treatment of that subject matter falls well short of the bar set by Drahos' book.

My favorite way to define cynic is "an idealist who learns from experience", which I think describes me pretty well. Lessig appears to be an idealist who does not learn from experience, whose biases stand in the way of really examining where he stands and what he thinks in a meaningful manner, and finding new insights. Even his direct explanation of his experience taking a case to the US Supreme Court, and learning important lessons from his failure there, does not really seem to indicate he learned anything worthwhile. He seems to have only learned new ways to make excuses for the naive ideological biases he carries with him about the law, the common platitudes about the relationship between copyright and starving artists, and other inanities. He's a lawyer, of course, and a law professor, and probably cannot continue working in that field as he does now without adhering to those unquestioned biases of his -- but that is not an acceptable excuse for his willful ignorance when he then tries to indoctrinate others with the same notions.

Throughout the book, he spends a great deal of time explaining how our restrictive copyright culture in the US is destroying pretty much all the rest of our culture, and touches on similar problems in other parts of the world in passing. He stresses his desire to take a "middle path" between the "copyright warriors" (those who support locking down our culture as a set of properties controlled by a tiny minority of corporate interests) and the "anarchists" (those who wish to abolish copyright altogether). His entire argument seems to rest on tradition and some hand-wavy notions about how the law is all about "balance". He manages to subtly miscast the state of "copyright" before there was copyright as we would recognize it today, suggesting that before the beginnings of the current copyright regime all the world of culture was somehow owned in perpetuity with no way for anyone to expand upon what came before, which is patently ludicrous nonsense, though I don't think he does this maliciously.

In the process of portraying the controversy over the state of copyright as a war between extremes, both of which are (he claims) horribly wrong, he manages to make the copyright abolitionists look like cackling villains who would reduce all the world to dust, rot, and stagnation, a blasted post-apocalyptic wasteland in the realm of culture, by saying almost nothing about them apart from his strident claims he is not among them. He even goes so far as to say that if the only choice was between the extremes he describes he would choose the route of absolute, perpetual, multinational corporate control of all culture.

In the midst of all this, he utterly fails to make any meaningful argument at all that copyright abolition, or even a less restrictive copyright regime than he proposes, would cause any actual harm at all. He states that great harm would be caused, several times, especially when he makes sudden (and strangely inappropriate) apologies for having the temerity to oppose corporate market domination even a little, but the statements come with precisely zero supporting argument. In fact, by implication, many of his examples of how to improve things by reducing the autocratic control of culture would serve exceedingly well to strongly support copyright abolition.

You may believe you have strong arguments supporting his view, or even the view of the corporate monopolists, and that's fine. If you do, you should share them. If you believe that Lessig arrives at the correct conclusions, you should support his causes. None of that, however, should blind you to the fact that his efforts to make his case are woefully inadequate in at least some areas, to the fact that his ability to construct a coherent justification is terribly deficient and in some ways even counterproductive, or to the fact that he is a naively biased ideologue with the apparent rationality of a typical Jerry Springer guest, if this book is the sole indication of such characteristics.

If copyright abolition is zero on the scale of positions in this controversial area, Lessig's position is three, and absolute, perpetual, universal corporate monopoly is five, I could construct a stronger argument for any position between zero and five -- including Lessig's own position -- in terms of underlying justifications, consistency, coherence, and logical validity, in probably about three thousand words, than Lessig did in more than three hundred pages.

Don't make the mistake I made, if you must read Free Culture: don't pay for this book or get someone else to buy it for you as a birthday or Christmas gift. Download it for free. It is available under a Creative Commons license for free download and distribution. That way you don't waste paper, money, or space on a book that may generously be described as barely rising to the level of mediocrity.

note: I find it ironic, having read this book, that Lessig expresses awareness of the burdens of intricate, finicky, and often unpredictable copyright law as one of the biggest problems facing creative people today, then goes on to (co-)author and champion a bunch of licenses (the Creative Commons licenses) that -- apart from the CC0 license -- impose significant legal compliance burdens on licensees. Even the CC-BY (attribution) license, supposedly requiring nothing more than giving attribution to the copyright holder when modifying, deriving from, displaying/performing, and/or distributing a work, contains complex legalities that create shadowy little nooks and crannies that can trip up a licensee as well as a plague of license incompatibilities, and even contains some little-known restrictions that are not represented in the "human readable summary" of the license propagated by the Creative Commons organization (such as the technology restriction clause). Lessig manages to contradict himself or undermine his own arguments at every turn, and often develops supposed solutions that create many of the same problems he purports to solve.
… (mere)
 
Markeret
apotheon | 17 andre anmeldelser | Dec 14, 2020 |

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Værker
22
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Medlemmer
4,633
Popularitet
#5,443
Vurdering
4.0
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63
ISBN
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