Larry Lessig is a genius. This man is a great thinker of our times. I hope that we all listen to him and make the right choice about how content is licensed for use. This is a link to a talk that he did for TED: Ideas worth spreading. Watch it. Learn it. Do it!

You can see his ideas in action at places like Flickr, which provide its users a way to allow others to share and use their artwork in other artistic ways. That is what Creative Commons is all about. Its also what open source is all about.

Our copyright and patent systems have become an abomination. They are now used to fight against the very reason they were created. They were created to increase innovation and ideas, and now they are used with a draconian fist to stifle those ideals.

Larry mentions that he is concerned about both extremist sides on this issue. That both the complete lockdown and lockout of content and the complete disregard for the creator's rights through blatant pirating are bad. Instead he wants content creators to license their work through ways that allow new ideas and innovation to happen without making other creative people criminals.

If you think this isn't important, see what just happened to all the hardcore baseball fans out there when Major League Baseball decided to change their DRM supplier and left fans who had previously purchased video out in the cold. DRM eventually will always makes content unavailable to its users. Everything that uses DRM right now that isn't cracked and used for another purpose is destined to die from view of our culture. If that is that case, then we should be desperate for non-DRM'd content. Whether you are just a consumer (who has just been screwed over by MLB), or an artist wishing to reuse content in a new way, or an original content creator, you should realize the severe risk that putting your content inside the so called "protection" of hideous copyright law and DRM. Its a death sentence for your ideas and your commerce.

Watch his talk and you will see how much sense it makes.

Are you wondering what you can do? One of the first things is that you can license all of your work under Creative Commons. You can post the license on the footer of your blog. You can include it on any of your writings, videos, audio, etc... Additionally, you can support awesome open source projects like Linux (Ubuntu is my favorite distro) and Drupal (the software I use for all of my websites).

You can also switch over to all open source software by looking at my Windows St. Thomas open source repository. Its a great place to start to send a message to the corporations that are trying to restrict your world through copyrights and patents.