Democratizing the Net

Larry Lessig, Stanford Law Professor and author of the recent book, Free Culture, was featured on yesterday's NPR show, The Connection. Lessig described recent trends of content lockdown on the internet. "The rules governing music and images and motion pictures are not the same in reality as the rules that govern text," he explained. These problems are coming to a head in new blogs that offer multimedia content (take podcasting, for example). While digital technology has catalyzed new forms of creation like satirical cartoons, remixed music, and entertaining images, emerging laws threaten to stifle these possibilities. Lessig described Creative Commons, a project he co-founded that offers a range of copyright licenses for creators who want to preserve their rights to share and re-use material.