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[Video] - Lawrence Lessig Sounds Off On Digital Rights

Lawrence Lessig lays down the law at the Vimeo Festival.

This past weekend Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons and lead crusader in the fight to reduce copyright restrictions, was part of a panel called “Know Your Digital Rights” at Vimeo Festival in NYC.

Lessig has built his career (not to mention his company) on the premise that the existing copyright and trademark laws are outdated and no longer hold in a world of digital remixes, mash-ups, and collaborative creativity. His Creative Commons licensing aims to empower today’s artists with the tools necessary to license their work according to their own terms, offering up options that release creative content with varying degrees of copyright protection—ranging from the ability to re-publish, re-purpose, or re-use completely. The tiered licensing structure offers a much-needed flexible alternative to the restrictive copyright laws that are currently our culture’s default setting.

On Friday, Lessig gave a sobering account of where the digital rights debate stands now—as far as he can tell, we don’t have any rights to speak of yet. But it wasn’t all gloom and doom. He also laid out a game plan for the large scale cultural shifts that need to take place in order to change that fact. Still, let’s just say we have our work cut our for us.

(Video of Lessig’s strategy spiel above.)