Lawrence Lessig’s Presentation at Google

Though the video itself is nearly a year old and the presentation was given in October of last year, Professor Lessig’s talk at Google, as part of the Authors@Google series, remains just as relevant today as it did when it was first given.

Unfortunately, I just stumbled across this video today on accident and, looking at the views counter in YouTube, it appears that only a handful of others have run across it either.

In the presentation, Professor Lessig covers much of the same ground as he did in his previous speeches but deals heavily with the merging of the “read only” and “read/write” Web economies, stating that companies that successfully create this “hybrid” economy will be the most valuable on the Web.

He also, in the Q&A that followed, talked about copyright reforms that he’d like to see, including the reintroduction of some form of copyright formalities, such as copyright registration (something I would be opposed to), and modification to exactly what act “triggers” infringement since copying is effectively automatic when dealing with digital works.

The presentation is made all the more poignant by the fact that, a few months after this speech, he resigned as the chairman for Creative Commons and, not long thereafter, largely withdrew from copyrighting altogether.

This video is a must-watch for people interested in the role copyright will play on the Web and I am embedding it below.

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