Among the privileged few – scholars and campaign funders

Lawrence Lessig, prolific author, Harvard law professor, and Creative Commons founder, opened the 2012 Center for Intellectual Property (CIP) Symposium Wednesday, June 6, 2012 in Baltimore with a powerful keynote he entitled the “Scholar’s Obligation.”

A note on technique:  Lessig used presentation software in an interesting way.  He did not read the slides; he used slides to punctuate and emphasize what he was saying.  He often did this by displaying the keyword of what he was saying or displaying exactly the words he was saying at key moments interspersed with interesting visuals.  The effect was riveting.  I bring this up because in moving away from bullet points and thinking about visual impact it had not occurred to me to use words on slides in this way, even though I’ve noticed it is done on TV ads all the time now.  Now, on to the content of the keynote-

Lawrence Lessig described a privileged world in which scholars live, financed by institutions to which they belong, but within which even some scholars’ efforts to promote openness is corrupted by a government where the money of special interests overpowers a republic of representative democracy.  If we want ultimate influence over our own spheres of life – that is, if we want individual votes to really count as if our opinions mattered – this fundamental moneyed corruption, now seeping into every aspect of the nation’s life, must be remedied.  In short, Lessig delivered a message way beyond what I expected.

For scholars in research institutions information is free.  Free to them.  The less prestigious the institution to which a scholar belongs, the slightly less freely complete the information readily at hand.  The structure by which scholarly information is distributed and the economics of that distribution drive this availability.  To make this point clear, Lessig illustrated how much it might cost unaffiliated citizen John Q Public to quickly retrieve a dozen research articles from a typical Google Scholar search.  The cost for online access would be hundreds of dollars.  Some articles were inaccessible.  Many, sensibly, feel this is not right.