Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning
What if Napster stocked textbooks? Engineering professor Richard Baraniuk talks about his vision for Connexions, an open-source system that lets teachers share digital texts and course materials, modify them and give them to their students — all free, thanks to Creative Commons licensing. About Richard Baraniuk: Rice University professor Richard Baraniuk has a giant vision: [...]
Creativity Being Strangled by Law
Elegant presentation by Larry Lessig, of three stories and an argument. The Net’s most adored lawyer brings together John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights, and the “ASCAP cartel” to build a case for creative freedom. He pins down the key shortcomings of our dusty, pre-digital intellectual property laws, and reveals how bad laws beget bad code. Then, [...]
