I’ve just finished listening to the audio of last month’s NY Public Library presentation by Larry Lessig and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, moderated by Steven Johnson, author of such books as Everything Bad is Good For You.
It starts out as a standard (which is to say, brilliant) Lessig presentation that runs about 20 minutes, but even if you’ve heard such before, the next hour-plus is a remarkable dialogue between Lessig and Tweedy, in which Tweedy really takes the fore, running down the artist’s case for Free Culture, for embracing P2P and explaining that opposing P2P is pretty moot, given that P2P isn’t going anywhere. I was especially fascinated by the idea that the ban on sampling — which disproportionately punishes African-American forms of music — is at its root racist.
I’ve gone to a lot of events like this, and it’s tempting to think that you’ve heard it all before, but there was a lot of new material here — it was inspiring.
(via Lessig)