This is the first site that comes to mind for me:
http://www.creativecommons.org

I am new to embedding videos so forgive the link:
http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/movingimages/Building_On_The_Past.mov

I tried to get the .mov file to work but it wouldn’t load on my computer at home. I’ll try at the office on Monday perhaps have better luck. I did listen to the introductions on the full length debate; the two sound very extreme from one another on the issue; I tend to be a bit more conservative about copyright use, in other words I think there should be some restricted use for copyrighted works. A persons intellectual property has value for that person to some extent they should have the right to maintain the right to how it is ueed.

There are so many things we could talk about with this.

I had already looked this up before Lessig got to it: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;” U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 8. So I agree that this is the standard against which we need to judge IP law: are we, on average, maximizing the improvement of technology and creative works? This is difficult to calculate, but the discussion is full of opportunities for casuistic guidance. It does indeed seem pretty clear that the law is intended to walk a line between encouraging people who do “original” creations to create and encouraging people who will then “refine” creations to go ahead and improve what has been done. (It also seems to me that that there is a tension between fitting the time frame to the work–software might pay off in 4 years but a painting might take 20–and the need for an easy, usable law that does not approach IRS levels of complexity.) I would argue that life+70 years is definitely too long a copyright. In some sense, I would like to give the author-creator say 10 or 20 years to make money off of his work as an exclusive right, and then a further, long-term right not to be misrepresented (i.e. credit where credit is due, falsified works maybe counting as libel) but everyone else is allowed to make copies and play with it (labeled clearly). CC is only a solution when people choose to use it; it does make the license that the creators give clearer, but the people we are really worried about are not about to use CC licenses!

There is also the ambiguity between “invention” and “discovery,” something that might, however, be cleared up by linguistic historians. This leads to the bigger question of how this should even work in a post-Industrial Revolution world, one that is much less grassroots than the world known by the framers. Basanta’s point about big corporate lobbying is well placed. In a time when companies pay employees to invent for them, do the employees need any additional incentive to invent? And is perhaps the prospect of profit sufficient to encourage the company to innovate? I am not sure whether they do or not, and this is a sticky area to navigate.

I had already been thinking about photography, and photograph-as-property vs. photograph-as-intellectual-property, since I think this is an interesting case. Photography rights are way more confusing as high quality reproductions become simpler. The particular difficulty is that photography as a “useful art” can go way over to the “useful” side and/or way over to the “useful” side. Someone on a group blog I read admitted to having made illegal copies of a professional photograph of her kids, having already paid hundreds of dollars in sitting fees and large prints. Now, under current law, this is illegal. My question is, when should this be illegal? Currently all rights reside in the photographer, except in cases where they need a model release (not applicable to people out in public). This makes sense when they are doing high-art photography. But what does it mean when you *hire* them to do your family portrait? What does it mean when they are doing an artistic photo with the dual purpose of selling you a picture of yourself and selling it to a stock-photo archive? What does it mean when they shut down their business and throw out your negatives, so that you can’t get a picture replaced three years after an event? What does it mean when you are the photographer and you are on vacation, and hand your camera to a stranger to get a group shot–should it be legal to share or print this photo?

As always, it is important to note the differences between patents, copyrights, and trademarks. I would also like to say I appreciated that they both had a sense of humor.

I also recently read the “True Names” anthology and would like to point you all to RMS’s “Right to Read” parable: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

This would just sound like RMS being RMS, who is known for being… excitable… except that this level of licensing is exactly what many textbook publishers, music companies, etc. are pushing for. It would still be a reach to get as dystopian as Orwell’s 1984, but the Right to Read story is actually pretty close to legally and technologically feasible right now. It’s the fact that we still have free libraries, physical books that we can lend each other, and people who make their works openly available online that keeps this scenario from being our current reality.

I just liked that it was the old guy arguing for things to stay as they are, and the young guy arguing for change. It reminded me of how resistant to adopting new technology older people can be.