Matt and I went into Boston today to see Larry Lessig speak at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute. He talked for an hour about remixing culture, and afterwards we went to Fire+Ice to remix some food. 🙂 Imagine what the world would be like if you had to pay a license fee to put ketchup on your potatoes, or combine them with steak. That’s kinda what copyright has come to. Matt blogged the talk, and I’m mirroring it because his Brandeis site won’t be around forever. This is also a good time to again plug my notes on a Zittrain talk from last year.

The best way to experience the lecture is to be there for it, the second best thing would be to have the MP3 along with slides available online. The third best thing is to watch/listen to a similar talk that Lessig gave a year or so ago at OSCON that has the MP3 plus the slides. He has a very neat presentation style — instead of PowerPoint bulleted lists, Lessig flashes short words and phrases onto the screen in real time as he talks, thus pointing out key words and quotes to give them an additional impact. It kinda has to be seen. Hopefully this lecture will get the same treatment as the OSCON one at some point.

You know what’s weird? Technically Lessig owns the copyright on his talk, and Matt, by blogging it, has probably violated his “rights”. Here’s hoping the hero of the commons won’t sue. 😉