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Re: A mini Lessig library

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