This is a video of a presentation made by Lawrence Lessig, an law professor at Stanford. I believe this is one of the most important speeches/presentations of our generation. What is at stake is nothing less than our ability to speak - be it in words, music, dance, design, computer code, or skywriting.

In this presentation, Lessig takes us to the metaphorical mountaintop, and allows us to gaze into the future, and see the promised land. That promised land is Creative Commons.

A little over a year ago, I mentioned a report via the Library Of Congress that had examined whether or not copyright law was providing the incentive for publishers to reissue (i.e., make available in some way) large portions of our cultural heritage. It was in this report that provided the following, prescient paragraph:

"The copyright status of historical sound recordings is unique among the creative arts in the United States. Federal law did not protect recordings until February 15, 1972. In fact, federal copyright law states that pre-1972 recordings will be protected by state and common law copyright until the year 2067. Although other copyrighted works routinely enter the public domain, this is not the case for recorded sound. With the exception of recordings of a few companies whose assets have been abandoned or donated to the public, there are virtually no public domain U.S. sound recordings. This includes many of the very first recordings, which were published as early as the 1890s. The usual allowances for copying or distributing given to older works by federal law under the orphan works clause do not and will not apply to pre-1972 recordings, further impeding public access. Because only the copyright owner can legally make old recordings available, historical recordings are at risk of physical loss as well as of passing, unnoticed, from the nation’s aural memory."

Aural memory.

Our history. Our stories. Our songs. In short..... US.

This battle, if there ever was one, is lost, I fear. There is so much cultural material missing from our overall historical picture (i'm painting with broad strokes here) that I think a certain tipping point has been passed with respect to even having a chance to reconnect with our cultural heritage, much less integrate it successfully into our modern cultural identity. In other words, much of our history has simply passed, unnoticed, from our memory.

A multitude of reasons exist that could sufficiently impart some kind of understanding of why this state of disconnect with our historical culture is so prevalent (I think it is), but I think Lessig has caught a particular essence: The disappearance of so much of our recorded past into the black hole of copyright was enabled by a legal system who's favor to administrators of copyrighted culture prevented any tangible public benefit. Catalog owners benefited, but at the cost of public access to these cultural records.

Creative Commons, by comparison, is a more flexible system, designed to accommodate commonplace behaviors within cultural affairs: the re-performance of significant songs (i.e., Happy Birthday, Queen's "We Are The Champions") with a maximum of economy. Whereas traditional (U.S.) copyright was founded on the idea of exclusivity, CC is founded on the idea that creators of cultural works should be given greater flexibility in deciding on what usage of their work they're comfortable with IN ADDITION TO an incentive to promote public usage of thier work.

And in this small, yet fundamental way, I believe the participants in CreativeCommons are creating our new cultural record - one that accomodates the fantastic variety of human creation, who's sheer inertia will come to replace traditional copyright in a single generation. One that will not pass so unnoticed from our aural memory.