Today’s Inside Higher Ed reports on Lawrence Lessig‘s call for copyright rebellion at the Educause Conference in Denver. Lessig is an open access advocate and law professor at Harvard University.
Lessig basic argument is that “the manner in which copyright law is being applied to academe in the digital age is destructive to the advancement of human knowledge and culture, and higher education is doing nothing about it.”
Academics — presumably stakeholders in the effort to advance knowledge — have been uncharacteristically and disturbingly silent on the copyright “insanity” that has befallen the information trade, Lessig said.
“We should see a resistance to imposing the Britney Spears model of copyright upon the scientist or the educator,” he said. “…But if you would expect that, you would be very disappointed by what we see out there in the scientific and and education communities.” Scholars, he said, have allowed the copyright conversation to be steered by lawyers and businesses who are not first and foremost to intellectual discovery.
To them, Lessig delivered a simple message: “Stop it.”
See this, for example.
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