While reading my blog buddy Don Dodge‘s blog, I went down a trail that led me to MySpace faces call to crack down on predators. I am interested in reading this article because it sounds relevant to all online communities. Unfortunately, this knowledge has expired.
As I recently wrote the obvious, “licensing is legal, and legal things are complex”. I should have wrote, licensing is the suck!
When ever I start thinking about licensing and it being the suck, I think to Lawrence Lessig‘s keynote presentation at the annual Open Source Convention (OSCON) made on July 24, 2002. My favorite parts are:
- Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
- The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
- Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
- Ours is less and less a free society.
O’Reilly Network — Free Culture: Lawrence Lessig Keynote from OSCON 2002
I highly recommend reading, hearing, or viewing the whole talk about a lot more than licensing that Lessig has given more than 100 times. It speaks to why licensing is the suck and presents some of the largest issues facing civilization today.
The term piracy when referring to theft of digitalized information is ridiculous. Piracy is a vile act involving theft, kidnapping and murder still committed today in the world’s oceans, and seeming on the increase, it has nothing to do with literature, movies, song, or software.