The University of Edinburgh                        

                                               

Press Release

Date: 31 March 2005

 

Cyber guru flies in to open up debate on internet access

 

The American academic who took on Microsoft in a celebrated court case over internet access rights will visit Edinburgh on Saturday (2 April) to debate who controls access to ideas on the net. Professor Lawrence Lessig, the world's leading thinker on internet regulation, will take part in a panel discussion with lawyers, journalists and technologists about how best to promote creative work in a digital world. The discussion, organised by the AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the University of Edinburgh, is part of this year’s Edinburgh International Science Festival.

 

The panel will discuss whether the unprecedented opportunities that the internet offers for the sharing of creative works – globally and at next to no cost – are being stifled by outmoded laws and business models. Search engines and peer to peer (P2P) networks, such as KaZaA, BitTorrent, eMule and the now defunct Napster have given people greater access than ever before to the songs, books, pictures and films. Yet the flipside is the difficulty of protecting, and providing economic incentives for, creators and publishers – the job that intellectual property (IP) laws have traditionally performed.

 

The last five years have seen “copyright wars” fought between bodies like the Motion Picture Alliance (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the P2P services, and the millions of downloaders worldwide. Napster has already been closed down (though since reborn as a legal paying service), and the future of the likes of KaZaA will be decided in a vital legal case in the US later this year. Copyright laws are seen by many as increasingly inappropriate restrictions on the digital world, ‘locking up’ knowledge that should be freely available in an online environment, and restraining the use of tools like P2P.

 

Stanford University-based Lessig, who challenged Microsoft creativeopyright industries over the length of protection afforded for copyright issues in the US Supreme Court in 1998, argues that creativity has always been about stealing, recycling and mixing. His unconventional initiative to combat the locking up of public domain knowledge, the Creative Commons movement, has taken root throughout the world and will shortly be launched in Scotland by Jonathan Mitchell QC and the AHRC Research Centre.

 

Andres Guadamuz, an advocate of 'open access licenses' at the AHRC Centre, explains: “Creators will have the opportunity to publish their work with ‘some rights reserved’ rather than ‘all rights reserved’. This means that an author, say, could let schools and universities use their work for free, but still demand royalties when copies are sold to ordinary readers. The net effect is that both authors and the public benefit.”

 

Cyberlaw: who controls access to ideas on the net? takes place at the Royal Museum, Chambers Street, on 2 April, 4-5pm. Tickets (£6/£4) from http://www.sciencefestival.co.uk The event will be chaired by Lilian Edwards of the AHRC Centre. The panellists are Professor Lessig, technology critic and web journalist Bill Thompson and Andres Guadamuz, of the AHRC Centre and Creative Commons UK.

 

For further information, please contact:

 

Nadine Eriksson-Smith, the AHRC Centre

Tel 0131 650 2014 or 07790 599187

 

Lilian Edwards, the AHRC Centre

Tel 0131 650 2016 or 07946 644256

 

The Press Office, University of Edinburgh Tel: 0131 650 2250/9547