Thanks to Politechbot I found real audio of Lawrence Lessig on the Diane Rehm Show. Lessig, a Stanford law professor, is the author of The Future of Ideas and is on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (donate to them!) which fights in court to help maintain our online freedom. He talks about the bleak future of the internet that is certain if people do not fight to keep their freedoms. He also goes into some of the problems that powerful copyright and patent law has caused in restricting innovation and freedom. At one point, Hilary Rosen of the RIAA phones in and tries to get the music industry’s message across.
Transferrable copyrights will kill the culture of the United States. While copyright is necessary in some degree to safeguard the livelihood of artists and creators, perpetual and transferrable copyrights and patents will strangle the cultural exchange and the natural process of building on the work of others. Ideas should not be commodified.