Humanist

Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture presentation.

If you don’t fight for your freedom, then you don’t deserve it.
- Lawrence Lessig

Open source advocates always see the fight for freedom as a battle between us and the government. No matter what, our government is for the people, by the people. No one will be able to take that away. These laws that exist, the laws that stop us from using what others have done and building on it, these laws are to protect us. They were set in place to make sure that no one takes something that we’ve made and does something that we don’t want done with our creation. Therefore, copyright laws are not in place to keep us from being as creative as possible, but are in place to protect our creativity. The problem is that the more creativity we want to protect, the more that our creativity is hindered. The battle in lies between ourselves.

Right now we, as open source advocates, feel that the protection of other creators is too much and that our creativity is being hindered as a result. We are trying to give up that protection by developing under licences such as the GPL which “give up” the rights that the law gives us by default. Others see this “giving up rights” as a way of trying to take away the rights of others. This is where the battle comes. We are giving up our rights because we feel that it is the right thing to do. The politicians and lawers percieve this as trying to take away the rights of others. Somehow, the laws to protect our creativity must be rebalanced to maximize everyones’ creativity. The battle is at a point right now where this rebalance is almost completely impossible because the more rights that OSS creators give up, the more the politicians take and try to use against us to protect the “other” creators.

This vail of misperception must be brought down. The balance between protection of our creativity and the protection of everyone elses’ creativity must be restored. Instead of trying to keep building on the laws that we already have, they need to be thrown out and re-stated. Laws are, in reality, just hypothesis of protection theories; Suggestions as to where the line should be drawn between our personal rights and the rights of all other people. This line may have been adequetly drawn years ago when the media didn’t include what we have today, but now that technoledgy has obviously outgrown the current lines, the line must be redrawn. Instead of a redraw, what we are seeing is politicians drawing the line wider and thicker; taking away the rights of both you peronally and all other people when really the line just needs to be nudged a bit.

Now, companies like Microsoft have moved into the space in the bloated line and use the line to protect them. The more rights that are given to “everyone” and taken away from “me,” the more power is given to the larger companies. The companies that represent “everyone.” We need squeeze the bloat out of the protection line and give the power back to the people.

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