Constance Craving (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} green_amber) wrote in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} edinburgers,@ 2005-03-23 17:19:00 |
|
Larry Lessig in Edinburgh
Press Release
US Cyber-guru Lawrence Lessig to visit Edinburgh Science Festival : open access, the public domain, and the future of ideas
Leading lawyers, journalists, and technologists, including Professor Lawrence Lessig, champion of the Creative Commons initiative, will debate the future of ideas and how best to promote creative work in a digital world, at a panel discussion as part of this year’s Edinburgh International Science Festival.
The talk “Cyberlaw: who controls access to ideas on the net?” chaired by Lilian Edwards of the AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law (“the AHRC Centre”) , will be held on the 2nd April 2005. The lecture is open to the public and tickets for the event can be purchased from http://www.sciencefestival.co.uk/
The panel will discuss whether the unprecedented opportunities the Internet offers for the sharing of creative works, globally and at next to no cost, are being impeded by outmoded laws and business models.
Search engines and, especially, peer to peer (P2P) networks, such as the now defunct Napster and the still extant KaZaA, BitTorrent , eMule, etc have made it easier to find and download the song, book, picture or movie you want than ever in the history of cultural creation. Yet the flipside of this potential paradise is the difficulty of protecting, and providing economic incentives for, creators and publishers: the job that intellectual property (IP) laws have traditionally performed.
The last five years have seen “copyright wars” fought between bodies like the Motion Picture Alliance (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the P2P services, and the millions of downloaders all over the planet. Napster has already been closed down (though since reborn as a legal paying service), and the future of KaZaA will be decided in a vital legal case in the US Supreme Court later this year. Copyright laws are seen by many as increasingly inappropriate restrictions on the digital world: ‘locking up’ knowledge that should be freely available, certainly in an online environment, and restraining the use of tools like P2P for legal purposes such as exchanging educational texts or free software like Linux.
Lessig, the leading thinker on Internet regulation in the world today, argues that creativity has always been about stealing, recycling and mixing: Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin were said to borrow from each other's brushwork. The 1990s hit "Clueless" with Alicia Silverstone was a modern-day adaptation of Jane Austen's "Emma."
Many rock stars such as Scotland’s own Franz Ferdinand also openly support the public downloading their works via P2P networks. Lead singer Alex Kapranos has said: "File-sharing is something that has really helped us as a band in getting established. When Franz Ferdinand played a gig in New York for the first time, a lot of people there already knew our songs and were singing along."
Lessig’s unconventional initiative to combat the locking up of public domain knowledge, the Creative Commons movement, has taken root all over the world and will shortly be launched in Scotland by Jonathan Mitchell QC and the AHRC Centre. Dr Andres Guadamuz, an advocate of “open access licenses” at the AHRC Centre, explains that: “Creators will have the opportunity to publish their work with ‘some rights reserved’ rather than ‘all rights reserved’. This means an author, say, could let schools and universities use their work for free, but still demand royalties when copies are sold to ordinary readers. The net effect is that both authors and the public benefit.”
The AHRC’s own on line journal, SCRIPT-ed, is freely accessible on the web under its own special Scottish open-access license. Most legal journals by contrast are too expensive to be widely read, especially in non-Western countries. “We get a 1000 hits a day, from 127 countries, including places like Zimbabwe, Vanuatu, Vietnam and Kyrgistan.” says Guadamuz, “ It’s great to know we can reach out to countries that really need to know about the cutting edge of technology law.”
Information for the Editor:
The event is organised by the AHRC Research Centre (“the Centre”) for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law based in the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh.
“Cyberlaw: who controls access to ideas on the net?” will be held in the Lecture Theatre, Royal Museum, Chambers Street, Edinburgh from 4-5pm chaired by Lilian Edwards, Co-Director of the Centre with participation from Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University, Bill Thompson, technology critic and web journalist, and Andres Guadamuz, of the AHRC Centre and Creative Commons UK.
Lawrence Lessig’s home page, with links to full text of his books and his web journal, can be found at http://www.lessig.org/ .
The Centre previously organised a talk on downloading by Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand: see coverage at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/366
SCRIPT-ed can be found at http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrb/script-ed/
Creative Commons is at http://www.creativecommons.org.
The Centre is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
The talk at the Edinburgh International Science Festival is supported by The Edinburgh Science Triangle.
For more information please contact:
Nadine Eriksson-Smith , 0131 650 2014 or Lilian Edwards l.edwards@ed.ac.uk
Press Release
US Cyber-guru Lawrence Lessig to visit Edinburgh Science Festival : open access, the public domain, and the future of ideas
Leading lawyers, journalists, and technologists, including Professor Lawrence Lessig, champion of the Creative Commons initiative, will debate the future of ideas and how best to promote creative work in a digital world, at a panel discussion as part of this year’s Edinburgh International Science Festival.
The talk “Cyberlaw: who controls access to ideas on the net?” chaired by Lilian Edwards of the AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law (“the AHRC Centre”) , will be held on the 2nd April 2005. The lecture is open to the public and tickets for the event can be purchased from http://www.sciencefestival.co.uk/
The panel will discuss whether the unprecedented opportunities the Internet offers for the sharing of creative works, globally and at next to no cost, are being impeded by outmoded laws and business models.
Search engines and, especially, peer to peer (P2P) networks, such as the now defunct Napster and the still extant KaZaA, BitTorrent , eMule, etc have made it easier to find and download the song, book, picture or movie you want than ever in the history of cultural creation. Yet the flipside of this potential paradise is the difficulty of protecting, and providing economic incentives for, creators and publishers: the job that intellectual property (IP) laws have traditionally performed.
The last five years have seen “copyright wars” fought between bodies like the Motion Picture Alliance (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the P2P services, and the millions of downloaders all over the planet. Napster has already been closed down (though since reborn as a legal paying service), and the future of KaZaA will be decided in a vital legal case in the US Supreme Court later this year. Copyright laws are seen by many as increasingly inappropriate restrictions on the digital world: ‘locking up’ knowledge that should be freely available, certainly in an online environment, and restraining the use of tools like P2P for legal purposes such as exchanging educational texts or free software like Linux.
Lessig, the leading thinker on Internet regulation in the world today, argues that creativity has always been about stealing, recycling and mixing: Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin were said to borrow from each other's brushwork. The 1990s hit "Clueless" with Alicia Silverstone was a modern-day adaptation of Jane Austen's "Emma."
Many rock stars such as Scotland’s own Franz Ferdinand also openly support the public downloading their works via P2P networks. Lead singer Alex Kapranos has said: "File-sharing is something that has really helped us as a band in getting established. When Franz Ferdinand played a gig in New York for the first time, a lot of people there already knew our songs and were singing along."
Lessig’s unconventional initiative to combat the locking up of public domain knowledge, the Creative Commons movement, has taken root all over the world and will shortly be launched in Scotland by Jonathan Mitchell QC and the AHRC Centre. Dr Andres Guadamuz, an advocate of “open access licenses” at the AHRC Centre, explains that: “Creators will have the opportunity to publish their work with ‘some rights reserved’ rather than ‘all rights reserved’. This means an author, say, could let schools and universities use their work for free, but still demand royalties when copies are sold to ordinary readers. The net effect is that both authors and the public benefit.”
The AHRC’s own on line journal, SCRIPT-ed, is freely accessible on the web under its own special Scottish open-access license. Most legal journals by contrast are too expensive to be widely read, especially in non-Western countries. “We get a 1000 hits a day, from 127 countries, including places like Zimbabwe, Vanuatu, Vietnam and Kyrgistan.” says Guadamuz, “ It’s great to know we can reach out to countries that really need to know about the cutting edge of technology law.”
Information for the Editor:
The event is organised by the AHRC Research Centre (“the Centre”) for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law based in the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh.
“Cyberlaw: who controls access to ideas on the net?” will be held in the Lecture Theatre, Royal Museum, Chambers Street, Edinburgh from 4-5pm chaired by Lilian Edwards, Co-Director of the Centre with participation from Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University, Bill Thompson, technology critic and web journalist, and Andres Guadamuz, of the AHRC Centre and Creative Commons UK.
Lawrence Lessig’s home page, with links to full text of his books and his web journal, can be found at http://www.lessig.org/ .
The Centre previously organised a talk on downloading by Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand: see coverage at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/366
SCRIPT-ed can be found at http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrb/script-ed/
Creative Commons is at http://www.creativecommons.org.
The Centre is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
The talk at the Edinburgh International Science Festival is supported by The Edinburgh Science Triangle.
For more information please contact:
Nadine Eriksson-Smith , 0131 650 2014 or Lilian Edwards l.edwards@ed.ac.uk
