Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Lessig: Copyright isn't just hurting creativity: it's killing science (video)

Copyleft crusader and Harvard professor Larry Lessig gave a new talk at CERN last week about copyright and how it has affected open access to academic or scientific information, with a bit of commentary about YouTube Copyright School. As usual, it’s blistering commentary. “It’s time to recognize that free access – as in ‘free’ as in speech access – is no fad, and it’s time to push this non-fad war broadly in the context of science,” says Lessig.

Whereas copyright tends to focus on protecting an artist’s ability to make money from her work, a scientist doesn’t use similar incentives. And yet, her work is often kept within the gates of the ivory tower, reserved for those whose universities or institutions have purchased access, often at high costs. (There are exceptions, the open database arxiv.org the most notable among them.) For science in the age of the internet, which wants ideas to spread as widely as possible to encourage more creativity and development, this isn’t just bad, argues Lessig, convincingly: it’s immoral.

Video
Source: Motherboard.tv 

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