Open Education entrevista a Lawrence Lessig , profesor de la Stanford Law School y reconocido especialista en legislación del ciberespacio. Lessig defiende el equilibrio entre los derechos de los creadores de contenidos (incluyendo a los meros propietarios) y los derechos del resto de ciudadanos del mundo (es decir, su uso público).
George Siemens, en Open Source Content in Education, Part 2, resumía su tesis sobre la propiedad intelectual y derechos de copia en estas cuatro proposiciones:
- La creatividad y la innovación siempre se construyen sobre el pasado.
- El pasado siempre intenta controlar la creatividad que se construye sobre él.
- Las sociedades libres posibilitan el futuro limitando este poder del pasado.
- La nuestra es cada vez una sociedad menos y menos libre.
Su blog y la web del Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society (CIS) son referencia obligada en temas de propiedad intelectual. Lessig es también uno de los creadores de Creative Commons (véase el icono que hay en la parte derecha de esta página), una iniciativa "to expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share."
Un par de preguntas de la entrevista:
Open Education: What’s happening in technology that is impacting creativity, freedom, and innovation?
Lessig: There’s an increasing push by content donors to find ways to control the distribution of content - to protect their 20th century business model for making money with content. These technologies are increasingly interfering with the end-to-end freedom that the Internet originally created, and interfering with the opportunity of the Internet to create great innovation. The concern is that, to protect content the way they did in the 20th century, they will have to defeat the Internet that was designed for the 21st.
...
Open Education: The education field has, in many ways, been the birthplace of innovation and creativity. Much of the debate of public commons has been focused on video, audio – almost a consumeristic evaluation of the impact of copyright. How does this translate into education?
Lessig: Education is dramatically affected by copyright regulation, in ways that have become so second nature that people take for granted and don’t see. The high cost of educational materials – libraries – a large part of the function of the copyright system; if we would have won the Eldred case, then a ton of material would begin to passinto the public domain that would be made available for almost free on the Internet. This would dramatically reduce the cost of libraries all across the world. Now they have to continue to buy books and acquire expensive physical objects in order to give people access content.
Addenda: En Tech Central Station: Visions of the Nanofuture
Glenn Harlan Reynolds video-entrevista a Lawrence Lessig (entre otros).