Lawrence Lessig

Professor, Stanford Law School

Re: Mix Me
49 minutes, 22.7mb, recorded 2005-03-17
Topics: Media
Lawrence Lessig
Culture is remix, and remix, culture. That's the message from an IT Conversations favorite, Lawrence Lessig, at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology (ETech) conference in 2005.

Humans have always made new culture by taking and remixing existing cultures, and have always been free to do so. Until recently the written word was the central medium for remix. As technology has advanced the mechanisms by which we remix our culture have changed to keep pace but the law has not. The question at hand is: should our freedom> to remix culture change when the ordinary means we use to remix culture changes?

As our technology and our culture become enslaved at the hands of the RIAA, MPAA, and others, Lessig proposes 4 steps we must take to counteract the degradation of our remix rights: 1) connect, 2) teach, 3) punish, and 4) politicize.

Following Professor Lessig's presentation, Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation asks Lessig questions that further illuminate Lessig's concepts.


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Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. He is the author of The Future of Ideas, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (currently being revised at the Code v2.0 Wiki), and most recently Free Culture. He also chairs the Creative Commons project and is a boardmember of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Center for the Public Domain.

This presentation is one of a series from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference held in San Diego, California, March 14-17, 2005.

For Team ITC:

  • Description editor: Cori Schlegel
  • Post-production audio engineer: Stuart Hunter

This free podcast is from our Emerging Technology Conference series.