Coffee with Larry Lessig

Last month I wandered over to Stanford to have a cup of coffee and a chat with "Mr. Creative Commons" himself, Dr. Larry Lessig. My primary reason was to get some background for a book review and for an In the DataCenter piece.

Of course, I also wanted to meet the guy behind the Creative Commons license, as I've also had much to do with licensing and structure with BSD and Unix over the years - it's "in the family" so speak.

Mr. Lessig is a thoughtful - actually somewhat brooding - man, with quite an interesting array of books in his office - not a legal CDROM to be seen, although I'm sure he has one stashed away somewhere. We immediately began discussing my latest work in massive video production given his interest in "fair use" of media and copyright issues.

ExecProducer is at heart a production house - blazingly fast, entirely automated, scalable to millions - but in essence the same as traditional production. That's what the MVP paper is all about. Speed, bandwidth, connectivity - all made it possible for open source and exchange of music to become commonplace. Isn't custom video the natural next step?

Yet all around is bitterness. As Dr. Lesig noted over coffee "There are too many lawsuits".

Now, I'm not an expert in law and public policy, even though I learned a few things in Professor Kirp's class at Berkeley - I'm just a technologist. But as I recall, Kirp would have said the question becomes "If we were to learn from the past, and had an entirely new mode of visual communications made available by an innovation in technology, how would you have made it so that we avoided all this conflict?"

I was the one left reworking the agreements for open source in the early days, with no guidance other than "make sure you give it away without warranty". Proactive isn't valued these days, even if you stay out of the troubles precisely because you think ahead. The fire-eaters will have their day.

But perhaps when enough people create their own media, whether under the CC or some other license, there may be more receptiveness for some of Dr. Lessig's ideas.