Week 12 - Electronic Civil Liberties / Creative Commons / Free and Open Source Software

This week Adam spoke about Copyright issues, creative commons and the ethically challenging dilemma surrounding civil rights. He basically plugged open source software - software created by a community of programmers for free use, modification and redistribution. Creative commons has similar ideals of re-mixing and redistributing, but not for monetary gains. We watched Lawrence Lessig's speech which dealt with the creative commons philosophy and the history of property rights. He contended that copying and recreating is part of the learning process for children. He spoke about the need to change the way media can be re-mixed, by using the creative commons law, rather than petitioning the government to change copyright laws.