A friend sent me a link to a great twenty-minute speech by Stanford University Professor of Law Larry Lessig. The speech, “How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law”, was filmed in March at the TED Conference but was posted just last month at the TED site. I’m posting it a bit late by blogging standards, but it’s a “better late than never” type of thing. It’s a must-see. A twenty-minute cultural moment, like Scorsese’s homage to Hitchcock.And even though many of you have seen this much-forwarded video already, I believe that Larry Lessig deserves as much bandwidth as possible. You won’t be disappointed with this presentation. Lessig is an incredibly engaging speaker who has gained a reputation of being quite a PowerPoint virtuouso. He’s passionate, incredibly brainy, and skilled at making an issue sound extremely pressing. Lessig gives a forceful speech about on how in our Internet-driven age, overly-restrictive control of copyright will truly stifle and stagnate creative expression in the youth today. Youth not only speak in a different way, but create and distribute knowledge in a completely different format. The older generation (music and movie execs included) need to stop and listen.

This presentation has some additional significance. This speech is probably the last public one Larry Lessig will probably ever give on this topic. In June, Lessig stated that he was shifting his academic focusfrom copyright and intellectual property issues to fighting the corruption that’s in the political process. As a founder of Creative Commons, an organization that helps artists, authors and scholars give others the freedom to adapt and build upon their works and improve their creativity without having to bring in any sort of legal counsel, Lessig has given creators a serious, concrete way to share information and build upon ideas without having the pressure and worry of the law breathing down their neck.I’m excited to see what Larry Lessig will be able to bring to the fight against political corruption. I hope he’ll speak with Jeff Tweedy regarding this cause. But I do know that there is still a lot of work to be done regarding Creative Commons, particularly at the higher educational level, where academic publishers seem to have their own stranglehold on creativity with their copyright regulations and such. But that’s a blog post for another day. Until then, enjoy the video. Share it. Remix it. Just don’t remix it with a Prince song.