In the ongoing and often heated debate regarding the appropriate balance for copyright law and DRM technology in a world of digital culture, Lawrence Lessig is both touchstone and lightening rod. Lessig posted a video of a talk he gave a year ago at the NY Public Library, with his minimalist slides synced nicely to the audio from the talk. [.torrent] [Google Video] Must-see TV for anyone with an interest in this debate.

I noticed the intergenerational aspect of this debate at iSummit, between the Boomer content-owners and their remixing social-media children, the Millennials. Lessig calls for calm and a ceasefire while the lobbyists, lawyers and activists take the time to understand the creative potential of these new technologies before that potential is regulated away:

We as a culture need to learn how to listen, to understand, to protect the creators that this technology will enable. Not just the creators from the 20th century, but the creators that our children will be when this technology empowers them. So we need to describe and understand their capacity; to understand how they make and create by hearing from them. They need to tell us, how is jazz made? Was there a lawyer sitting next to the jazz artist as he sampled from the works of those who he built on? How was hip-hop inspired? Was it inspired with a catalogue of work that one called up permission to seek, to use, to remake to express a new form of creativity? How is art made? Tell us. Tell us, who use the tools of law to regulate you. Because unless you start showing us…how you create and have always created….then this potential, which is being realized every moment by kids using technology today, will be taken away.

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