One can sympathize with Larry Lessig's frustration in "An Obvious Distinction": LL: "In 2010, [for David Wallace-Evans] to suggest [in a 6000-word review in The Nation] that [the Creative Commons movement] 'exhort[s]⦠piracy and the plundering of culture'... betrays not just sloppy thinking [but] extraordinary ignorance⦠[and lack of] respect for what has been written⦠This terrain has been plowed a hundred times in the past decade⦠Reading is the first step to⦠respect for what has been written... Reading is what Wallace-Wells has not done well."
Larry tries to correct Wallace-Evans's 6000 sloppy words with 878 carefully chosen ones of his own. Let me try to atone for my own frequent long-windedness by trying to put it even more succinctly (20 words): Creative Commons' goal is to protect creators' give-away rights -- not consumers' (or 2nd-party copyright-holders') rip-off rights. (Reader's of the American Scientist Open Access Forum may have a sense of déjà lu about this since at least as far back as December 2000: http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1048.html ) ________________________________________________________________________________ Harnad, Stevan (2000/2001/2003/2004) For Whom the Gate Tolls? Published as: (2003) Open Access to Peer-Reviewed Research Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving: Maximizing Research Impact by Maximizing Online Access. In: Law, Derek & Judith Andrews, Eds. Digital Libraries: Policy Planning and Practice. Ashgate Publishing 2003. [Shorter version: Harnad S. (2003) Journal of Postgraduate Medicine 49: 337-342.] and in: (2004) Historical Social Research (HSR) 29:1. [French version: Harnad, S. (2003) Cielographie et cielolexie: Anomalie post-gutenbergienne et comment la resoudre. In: Origgi, G. & Arikha, N. (eds) Le texte a l'heure de l'Internet. Bibliotheque Centre Pompidou: 77-103. ________________________________________________________________________________ The persistent "piracy" canard calls to mind others like it, foremost among them being: "OA ⡠Gold OA (publishing)"... ________________________________________________________________________________ Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The green and the gold roads to Open Access. Nature Web Focus ________________________________________________________________________________