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Lessig on Digital Barbarism
Lawrence Lessig has posted a review of David Halperin's recent book, Digital Barbarism.
Halperin, who authored the (in)famous New York Times article calling for perpetual copyright, has now compiled his ideas into a book. Lessig offers a much-needed critique, including citing misconceptions about Creative Commons (Halperin conflates it not only with "freeware" with software... more
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BISA Copyright Review: K.I.S.S
Paul Jacobson · Johannesburg Gauteng (South Africa) · Jun 23rd, 2008 6:36 pm · 20 votes · no comments made
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There seems to be a number of copyright review processes underway these days and thank goodness for that. What strikes me is how important it is that we lawyers keep the process intelligible to the general public despite the tendency and temptation to completely geek out (in the legal sense). Lawrence Liang spoke about this a little in his introduction to the BISA (Brazil, India and South Africa) Copyright Review process where he talks about one of the goals of this process: to produce a human readable report that is both meaningful and engaging.
It is easy for us legal types to forget that, for the most part, the general public is peripherally aware of copyright in their daily lives and perhaps only marginally aware of copyright's implications on a very real, personal level. Discussions about alternative licensing models and even review of copyright law itself is akin to a discussion about life on other planets and whether those aliens have 3 legs or 4.
The challenge here is that without popular support for a copyright review process it is largely academic and not terribly relevant to the general public. If this process is to yield real fruit then it can't be yet another dry, largely academic exercise with big words and confusing arguments. Those valuable academic and policy perspectives must be converted (translated, even) into straightforward and interesting language if this copyright review process is going to make a real difference in the lives of those people who could most benefit from these anticipated reforms.
tags: johannesburg south africa policy-law lcgc local-commons-global-context plain-language bisa copyright-review keep-it-simple
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