Today, I happened on a site which has collection of remixes of Lawrence Lessig’s book, Free Culture. “Remix?” you say – well, yes. Lessig, a law professor, is one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Creative Commons licenses.
These are simple, easy-to-use licenses that allow people to make their works accessible and modifiable through a not-as-restrictive-as-proper-copyright-license – or some-rights-reserved license.
For instance, you can publish something under a CC license, and allow derivative works. That’s what Lessig has done with his book, and the page I’ve found has a long list of translations, versions in various formats, or even creative interpretations.
The one that I found most worthwhile was this flash-presentation – with the audio from one of Lessig’s talks at the Open Source Conference in 2002. It is a clear and simple presentation that combines the dynamics of flash with the passionate words of Lessig to good effect. So if you got half an hour to spare to learn about the issues of copyright since 1774, I recommend you check it out.
