A few weeks ago, AKMA asked if anyone wanted to record, post, and host a chapter of Lawrence Lessig's new book Free Culture. Lessig had released the book under a Creative Commons license and had not reserved the rights to non-commercial audio performances of the book. The speed and enthusiasm with which Lessig's fans recorded the book surprised both AKMA and Lessig himself. I talked to Lessig, AKMA, and others, about this phenomenon a couple of weeks ago and wrote a piece for The Globe and Mail about it. It's in today's paper, buried in the middle of the Review section. I will also try to put excerpts from those interviews online here shortly, as they all had tremendously interesting things to say and I simply ran out of room trying to say them all in the paper. My colleague Guy Dixon had earlier told Globe readers about the Creative Commons license.:
Righting copywrongs
Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig has turned the intellectual ownership debate on its ear
While Canada's content creators pored over a controversial Federal Court of Canada ruling that seemed to set ideas about ownership of intellectual property on its head, Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law School professor, author, and influential voice for copyright reform in the United States, was out proving that free downloads and fewer restrictions can be a creator's best friend.
On March 31, the Federal Court ruled that sharing digital music files over the Internet did not infringe on copyright rules. Some filmmakers, TV broadcasters, authors, software publishers and other content creators wondered if their work was still copyright-protected under Canadian law.
The ruling sparked a debate on Canada's editorial pages and Internet chat rooms about the rights of creators to control their work.
Lessig convinced his publisher, Penguin Books, to allow his new book, Free Culture, to come into the world this spring under a Creative Commons licence, a relatively new kind of copyright which, among other things, allows anyone to make and distribute a non-commercial audio performance of his book without even asking his permission.
And sure enough, days after the book's release, one of his fans put out the call: Are there any volunteers who would read and record a chapter of Free Culture and then post an MP3 copy of that recording on their website? … [Read the full story}
And here's a bit of news on this subject this morning. Boing Boing notes that:
“Some Chinese bloggers have recently launed a collabrative transaltion project to translate Lessig's Free Culture into Chinese, Create a Wiki page in SocialBrain. So far, 21 people have joined this collaborative project, memes appeared in lots of blogs. 12 chapters were assigned by contributors to translate.”
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