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IT Conversations: Lawrence Lessig - Re: Mix Me

While subscribed to it, I have stayed out of the Creative Commons discussions, choosing to focus on the "joy" of development - knowing I would have to get into it at some point later on.

However, I saw that Eric was giving a talk on how to make marketing for geeks more understandable and then just yesterday, I was driving home from a Montreal client visit and listened to this podcast from Lawrence Lessig given at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference in March.

This talk blew me away. It puts every DRM debate into a very basic context - and the possible repercussions of recent actions by the US Supreme court are frightening. The Q&A is especially useful when someone essentially says "I need a license that says don't copy my work, but if you mess with it, that's ok with me". And the discussion that ensues.

In short - our entire society is based on remixing. We remix letters to create words, remix words to create paragraphs, remix ideas into inventions, and so on. So while no, we shouldn't be allowing the pure copying of ideas, we should certainly allow for the mixing of them.

A little similar to Donald Norman's comments as well.

IT Conversations: Lawrence Lessig - Re: Mix Me

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