Lessig and Ito

Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Harvard University, as well as the author of five books on law and technology. I have actually read his work before; I was assigned to read Free Culture in its entirety last semester for my New Media class. It is written in a way very similar to Free Culture, with plenty of well developed and explained real world examples. A common theme to these examples is the exploitation of copyright by the copyright holders themselves, using their power to intimidate the little guys. His main issue is the collateral damage caused by these copyright wars, that being limits to creativity. The people starting these wars are only concerned about money, but money is the least of most of these “offenders” concerns.

Mimi Ito is a cultural anthropologist, based at the University of California-Irvine. She was born in Japan and grew up back and forth between the US and Japan, before pursuing higher education at Harvard and then graduate work at Stanford. Most of her work focuses on digital media and how it changes relationships and communities. The piece we read was really fun, I really liked that it was originally a presentation. It was a very nice balance to Lessig’s piece, showing the products of the creativity from the remix culture Lessig hopes to protect.