Lessig: Copyright isn't just hurting creativity: it's killing science (video)
Posted by Alex_Pasternack on Monday, Apr 25, 2011
Copyleft crusader and Harvard professor Larry Lessig gave a new talk at CERN last week about copyright and how it has affected open access to academic or scientific information, with a bit of commentary about YouTube Copyright School. As usual, it’s blistering commentary. “It’s time to recognize that free access – as in ‘free’ as in speech access – is no fad, and it’s time to push this non-fad war broadly in the context of science,” says Lessig.
Whereas copyright tends to focus on protecting an artist’s ability to make money from her work, a scientist doesn’t use similar incentives. And yet, her work is often kept within the gates of the ivory tower, reserved for those whose universities or institutions have purchased access, often at high costs. (There are exceptions, the open database arxiv.org the most notable among them.) For science in the age of the internet, which wants ideas to spread as widely as possible to encourage more creativity and development, this isn’t just bad, argues Lessig, convincingly: it’s immoral.
Connections:
The copyright Motherboard
Where the Digital Rights Debate Stands: Creative Commons Founder Lawrence Lessig at Vimeo
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