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Library Journal | Cahners - Copyright in the Balance: LJ Talks with Lawrence Lessig. Lawrence Lessig" title="Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace - by Lawrence Lessig" >

Stanford University professor Lawrence Lessig is certainly no stranger to the library community. Considered the nation's most eminent legal scholar on the nexus of copyright, technology, and the Constitution, he is the highly regarded author of the landmark works Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (Basic Bks.) and, most recently, The Future of Ideas (Random). In these works he eloquently defends the need to balance creators' rights with public benefits. Now, in a more direct way than ever before, Lessig carries the hopes of the library community, and by extension a largely unknowing public, squarely on his shoulders.

In a promising sign for libraries and the public, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed in February 2001 to review whether Congress overstepped its bounds in 1998 when it passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, extending copyright terms for another 20 years. Lessig will argue the case, Eldred v. Ashcroft, on behalf of a group of online publishers that offer digital editions of public domain books for free over the Internet. Two lower courts already ruled against the plaintiffs, but hopes are high in the library community that the third time could be the charm.

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This simplistic notion of what copyright is and how people think about it is weakening the debate substantially. We need to be much more aggressive in calling people on this rhetoric, because it's just wrong. It's just not the case that copyright has ever been understood to mean that if you use a copyrighted work in a way unintended by the copyright owner that's "theft." [Privacy Digest]