Blackmoor Vituperative

Dan Farber at ZDNet has an tepid piece on Lawrence Lessig‘s speech at the Open Source Business Conference. I wish we could have access to the full text of Lessig’s speech. Instead, Farber provides us with sound bites:

“There is a war against the freedom to innovate and this community has done way too little to resist,” Lessig said. “I am a puny, independent law professor. If you are depending on me [to fight the war] you are hopeless and lost,” he added.

A good summary, but I would have liked to read the meat of Lessig’s speech. I could also do without Farber’s facile acceptance of the tragic state of intellectual property law and the one-sided propaganda from RIAA, MPAA, and their ilk:

The battle isn’t strictly about open source versus closed source software or whether piracy is an evil. That’s a given.

No, Dan: it’s not a given. It’s not a given because defining the vast majority of “unauthorized copying” as “piracy” is a fiction invented to demonize fair use so that large media companies can further pervert our legal system to line their own pockets.

It’s a shame that the main theme of Lessig’s speech went over Farber’s head:

“More significant is to become part of the debate. The biggest problem is that the debate is dominated by lawyers and lobbyists who don’t have a direct stake in the outcome.”

He’s talking about you, Dan. Take your head out of the sand and stop parroting the propaganda from the real pirates: RIAA, MPAA, and the other robber barons of the digital age.