Re: A mini Lessig library

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

It's great to have all three of Lessig's book available in this 
way for easy searching. I used the search to find the page in 
"The Future of Ideas" (p. 258) where Lessig says (commenting on 
Jessica Litman's suggestion for "recasting copyright as an 
exclusive right of commercial exploitation") that, while an idea 
worth exploring, it rests on shaky ground because "the Net itself 
has now erased any effective distinction between commercial and 
noncommercial." I think Lessig is exactly right. But then I 
wonder, isn't the Creative Commons license (for which Lessig was 
the progenitor) itself fundamentally based on that distinction? 
So, did Lessig change his mind, or did people just forget that 
Lessig himself made this comment long ago? Does anybody out there 
want to try defending this distinction, which Lessig himself once 
repudiated as indefensible?

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


> This announcement may be of interest to the list:
>
> http://exacteditions.blogspot.com/2008/02/lessig-library.html
>
> For sure, three books by Lessig is the merest pimple in
> comparison to the remarkable milestone announced this week of a
> million books in the GBS system at Michigan. But the Exact
> Editions platform is quite compatible with the Google approach
> and it is an alternative which has some advantages for readers,
> libraries and publishers. There should certainly be some
> alternatives -- wonderful and awe-inspiring as the Google library
> project is.
>
> Declaration of interest -- I am one of the founders of Exact Editions
>
> Adam Hodgkin