Lawrence Lessig – TEDTalks

These are great. I saw the first one years ago probably not long after it came out and it was very influential in shaping my thoughts about modern copyright issues. Unfortunately, there has not been major progress in copyright law to reflect the new digital realities that we live with. However, Creative Commons and other organizations have accomplished much. I was introduced to Creative Commons through it being a default search tool in some version of Firefox several years ago. I’m not sure if it is still installed by default but I still use it from time to time.

In the 2nd video, I like that Lessig was an equal opportunity annoyer by calling out Democrats and Republicans on their weaknesses and pointing to a Libertarian as the common sense solution. However, I felt like he stretched his comments too far by making such assumptions that Wall Street bankers don’t share outside of a church picnic or even that they go to church at all. He’s playing to stereotypes and that lessens the content of his talk for me but his approach does emphasize his point (like in the first video) that there is a reasonable middle ground.

One vision I have for our library is that it becomes a hub of content creation. We are fortunate in that we have excellent computer labs throughout campus and many students have modern computers of their own, but I believe that our library can be a focus point for creation of content beyond specific assignments for class. Our 11th graders all write a lengthy research paper on a topic chosen from a relatively short list of possible topics. At the library, we can certainly help them with this kind of research which is the same kind of research and creation libraries have been expected to help for decades. I’d like to see us go beyond this level of creation to where students are unleashed to create without as many restrictions. If the 11th graders were permitted to choose from more topics (those of more relevance to their lives) or even permitted to choose *any* topic, I believe we would end up with some more creative and interesting research papers. I would like to see teachers give open assignments and students challenged to create outside of class assignments. I think that one of the best ways to teach students about copyright is for them to be content creators and be forced to think through the issue not just as a consumer of content, but as a creator too.