To do in NYC: Shepard Fairey + Lawrence Lessig + Steven Johnson on copyright, fair use, and AP shitstorm around Obama poster

On February 26 at the New York Public Library, there will be a group discussion with Lawrence Lessig, Shepard Fairey and former Boing Boing guest blogger Steven Johnson. The event is said to be Lessig’s final planned public discussion of remix, copyright issues, and so on, before he departs Harvard this fall to head up the Safra Center for Ethics. There, he’ll be directing interdisciplinary research on institutional corruption (medical, political, big picture things). Snip from the event description:

What is the future for art and ideas in an age when practically anything can be copied, pasted, downloaded, sampled, and re-imagined?

LIVE from the NYPL and WIRED Magazine kick off the Spring 2009 season with a spirited discussion of the emerging remix culture. Our guides through this new world–who will take us from Jefferson’s Bible to André the Giant to Wikipedia–will be Lawrence Lessig, author of Remix, founder of Creative Commons, and one of the leading legal scholars on intellectual property issues in the Internet age; acclaimed street artist Shepard Fairey, whose iconic Obama “HOPE” poster was recently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery; and cultural historian Steven Johnson, whose new book, The Invention of Air, argues that remix culture has deep roots in the Enlightenment and among the American founding fathers.

Tickets are on sale here, $25 general/$15 students or seniors. (Thanks, Melanie Cornwell!)

Above, a previous Boing Boing Video episode with Shepard Fairey, about how that Obama poster came to be.