Here’s a quick video of Jonathan Zittrain answering a question I posed to him from Second Life. Namely: How do we win the fight for free culture when the hardware / OS layer is being increasingly locked down by Microsoft and Apple for freely creating, sharing and re-mixing our content?
The context was a panel discussion with Jonathan and Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons on the topic of "I vs Commons: The Struggle of the Individual in the Net." It was held today at the iCommons Summit in Dubrovnic, Croatia and streamed live in Second Life on the USC Annenberg sim. What happened was that the in-world hosts asked if anyone had any questions, and I threw mine in the mix, assuming that it would not get addressed given the packed crowd at the real world event. Surprisingly, my question came up second! I was barely able to start up my video capture as Jonathan started to address it. I was totally floored.
Both speakers were very entertaining, rehearsed, intelligent and
passionate about the cause of free culture and reformulated copyright
laws. Dr. Lessig ended his talk noting that he was stepping down from
a lot of his public leadership roles in order to allow others to take
the fore. This is a brave and wise move on his part that I respect a
lot.