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Lawrence Lessig

Founder / Board Member Emeritus

Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Prior to rejoining the Harvard faculty, Lessig was a professor at Stanford Law School, where he founded the school’s Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court.Lessig serves on the Board of Creative Commons, MAPLight, Brave New Film Foundation, The American Academy, Berlin, AXA Research Fund and iCommons.org, and on the the advisory board of the Sunlight Foundation. He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Association, and has received numerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Award, Fastcase 50 Award and being named one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Visionaries.Lessig holds a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a JD from Yale.

Posts by Lawrence Lessig

Wikipedia and Creative Commons next steps

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Last week the Wikimedia Foundation board took an important step toward giving Wikipedia the right to choose to migrate to a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Credit goes to the Wikimedia Foundation and Free Software Foundation for having the wisdom and foresight to enable this progress. However, the real work has just begun. As Wikipedia founder…

Version 3.01 – Public Discussion Launched

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Hello CC Community, I’m writing to tell you about an update we are proposing to our current version of our licenses (3.0). Because the update is intended simply to make clear something we intended the license to mean, this version would be numbered 3.01. As you know, in February 2007, after 9 months of public…

Creative Commons @ 5 years

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Five years ago this December, we launched Creative Commons. At a party with music by DJ Spooky, and video endorsements by John Perry Barlow and (the late) Jack Valenti, we began to implement a gaggle of legal hacks to let the copyright system better reflect the views of many artists, authors, educators, and scientists. Some…

Retiring standalone DevNations and one Sampling license

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Today we are retiring two of the Creative Commons licenses — the stand alone Developing Nations license, as well as one of the three Sampling licenses we offer. The reasons for these retirements are both practical and principled. The practical reason is simple lack of interest: From the start, Creative Commons has promised to keep…