 It's such an honor to have Larry Lessig back with us. Larry keynoted at, I think, the third annual open education conference. We were still having it up in Logan, Utah. OK, this is why I wrote notes, because I'll actually get emotional if I start just talking about Larry. Larry is the Roy L. Furman, Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School and director of the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Prior to rejoining the Harvard faculty, Larry was a professor at Stanford Law School, where he founded the Center for Internet and Society. He has clerked for Justice Scalia on the US Supreme Court and received countless rewards, including the Free Software Foundation's Freedom Award. You might not have known all of that about him. You know him as the founder of Creative Commons that provides the licenses that enable all of the work that we do in the open education space. So I am so humbled and so honored to introduce to you Larry Lessig. Please help me welcome him to the stage. So thank you, Dave. It's incredibly fun to be back, although I've got to say that I prefer Utah over Washington. I'm hoping you won't give up the idea of Utah in the future. I'm sorry. I usually don't have any technical problems at all. I don't know what happens in my technical skills. Here, there we go. OK. So nobody has the power to get me to talk about copyright issues anymore, except Dave Wiley. And when I was thinking about this idea of coming and talking to you about these issues again, I was looking back at this period of my life, which was a long, happy, not so happy period of my life. And I recognize that the great thing about what you do is that you work in a space where there is both good parts and difficult parts, creative parts and depressing parts, parts where people do things, create amazing applications or educational material or sites that organize and celebrate, as well as stop people through the ways in which the law interferes with this creativity. It was the good and the bad together. And as I thought about it like that, I realized that, for me, a symbolic moment figure in that way of thinking about this stage was somebody I know a lot of you knew as well, a friend, Aaron Swartz. Because Aaron Swartz was, for me and for many of us, an organizer, an idealist, an inspiration. He was, at the beginning of Creative Commons, an organizer, an idealist, an inspiration. Creative Commons, of course, an organization which I didn't found. I helped found. There were many who helped push this into life. But the person who made it real, who wanted to make it practical, was Aaron. We talked about the ideals of what Creative Commons would do, but Aaron was the technical architect. And when we launched Creative Commons, he was insistent that we focus on the practical, technical features of Creative Commons. He insisted so strongly that we asked him to step up on stage to introduce Creative Commons. And here he was. Well, thanks. Now that you've seen the theory behind Creative Commons, it's time to show you some of the practice. So when you come to our website here, we want to show you the practice. We want to introduce you to the structure that gives you this list of options. And that was the way he was in everything he did, which was grabbing the theoretical and making it practical. And for many years, we worked together. But then about eight years ago, he came to me and he asked me a question. I was eager to share with him the work that I was doing preparing my first great TED talk. This was fat Larry. So I was going to give a talk at TED my first talk about the laws that show creativity, what a title that was. And I was eager that he see the ideas that I was putting together. And I shared with him a little bit of the outline for the talk. And he was a little impatient with the theory. And he wanted to talk about the practice. And he said to me, so how do you think you're ever going to achieve the things you're fighting for? Changes in the way copyright law regulate the creative process. So long as we have this basic corruption in the way our government functions. And I was a little miffed with that question. I was eager for him to be excited about my laws that show creativity talk. So I pushed back a bit. And I said to him, you know, Aaron, it's not my field. Not my field. And he said, you mean as an academic? It's not your field? I said, yes, as an academic. It's not my field. He said, OK, fine. But what about as a citizen? Is it your field as a citizen? And this was the way Aaron was. His questions spoke as clearly as a child's hug. And from that moment, I took up the challenge. And I agreed that the next chunk of my life would be work on this problem, this problem of this corruption, this problem that was central, not just to the problems of copyright, but to every other problem. But as I look back on this, I realized that when I did that, I gave up the hopeful part. And now I live in just the depressing part as I've continued the work which he set me on. And of course, I've written books. And I've given literally hundreds of talks. First, aiming to understand this problem, but then in an Aaron way to understand how to respond to this problem. So I want to share with you a little bit about how we should understand it first on the way to recruiting you to the challenge of how we should take it on. So how to understand it? So I'm going to give you something, a gift. I'm going to give you one word that you can use to understand exactly what the problem with our government is, a single word. The word is tweedism. Tweedism, inspired by the Cherry Street philosopher Boss Tweed, who used to say, I don't care who does the electing, as long as I get to do the nominating. Now that idea, we're going to call tweedism. And it formalizes. It's like this. There's a two-stage process, or you could say an end stage process, where in the first stage, the tweeds get to do the selecting, that then sets up the candidates who the rest of us get to do the electing. And there's a filter in the middle. And the question that we ask when we look at democracies or any form of government and observe it to be a tweetest government is, is that filter in some sense biased? So when you think about tweedism around the world, there are lots of examples. Think about the old Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was, they said, a democracy because they had an election, an election where all citizens got to vote. But of course, before they had that election, the Politburo, where the Commies got to vote, chose the candidates who would run in the election. So to run in the election, you had to do well in the Politburo, a two-stage process, a tweetest process where 19 people got to pick the candidates the 270 million people would be governed by. Now when the Soviet Union said, this is a democracy, we said, come on, that's absurd. That's not a democracy. Nothing to do with what a democracy is. But we should, of course, be a little bit reflective before we insist on the absurdity of calling that a democracy. Because think about democracy in America. Think about tweedism in America. In the old South in America, 1870, we did something nobody thought we would do. We ratified an amendment to the Constitution that said African-Americans could not be denied the right to vote on the basis of their race. And when they did that in 1870, most thought the future would look something like this. But in fact, the future instead looked like this, not a future of equality and a future of exclusion. For 100 years, OK, it's a little bit of exaggeration. For 95 years, there was a concerted effort by the South to exclude African-Americans from participating in the political process, no place more ambitiously than the great state of Texas, which by law had an all-white primary. He said only whites could vote in the Democratic primary. So in the old South, there was a general election where all citizens got to vote. But before that, there was a white primary where only whites got to vote. And you had to do well in the white primary to be able to run in the general election. A two-stage process which excluded at the critical first stage African-Americans from participating, a significant minority of America. And the consequence, of course, obviously, was a democracy responsive to whites only. Now, this idea of tweetism is particularly salient right now across the world. Think about what's going on in Hong Kong, credible protests all across Hong Kong that stopped the government and forced them into this process of rethinking the future. I want you to see that these two are protests against tweetism. Because what China said in 2007 was that there would be a democracy in Hong Kong. By 2617, the governor, the chief executive, would be elected in Hong Kong. But in August, they described how that election process would work. They said the ultimate aim is the selection of a chief executive by universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee in accordance with democratic procedures. That committee, 1,200 citizens, means about 0.024% of Hong Kong would do the nominating of the candidates who got to run in the election. So Hong Kong, too, has an election. All citizens would vote. But the nominations would be done by the 1,200. You had to do well in the nominating committee to be able to run in the election. A two-stage process with this filter defining it as tweetism, which triggered the strike across the country. Because the claim was that filter was biased. As the democracy forces argued, the 1,200 were dominated by a pro-Beijing business and political elite. As Martin Lee, the chairman of the Hong Kong Democratic Party, put it, we want a genuine universal suffrage, not democracy with Chinese characteristics. But the point I want you to see is it's not really Chinese characteristics that defines what Hong Kong was offering. It's increasingly universal, modern, obvious. And we should think a little bit about whether it applies here, too. Because we take for granted in America, campaigns are privately funded. And funding, of course, is essential to the process of getting elected. So there's a two-stage process we could think about getting elected in America. The first is funding, getting the money you need to run. And the second is running, getting the votes you need to be elected. Not to run in America, candidates and members of Congress spend anywhere between 30% and 70% of their time raising the money they need to get to Congress or to get their party back into power, dialing for dollars to get the resources they need to run. B.S. Skinner gave us this image of a Skinner box where any stupid animal could learn which buttons it needed to push to get the sustenance it needs to survive. This is the picture of the modern American Congressperson. As the modern American Congressperson learns which buttons he or she must push in order to survive, as any of us would, they develop in this process a sixth sense, a constant awareness about how what they do will affect their ability to raise money. They become, in the words of the ex-files, shapeshifters, as they constantly adjust their views in light of what they know will help them to raise money. Leslie Byrne, a Democrat for Virginia, describes that when she went to Congress, she was told by a colleague, quote, always lean to the green. And to clarify she went on, he was not an environmentalist. So as we think about this process of calling for 30% to 70% of the time, we need to think about, who are the funders? Who are the people that are being called? And the reality is, at most, it's not as bad as Hong Kong, 0.024%, at most, in America, it's 0.05% of America, who's being called. These are the relevant funders, the people who give enough to matter. About 150,000 Americans, which the internet tells me is the same number of people as they're named Lester, which is why I called this in my TED Talk, Lesterland. And after the Supreme Court's decision in McCutcheon, that number is going to fall, I think, to no more than 35,000, which turns out to be the same number of people as they're named Sheldon in the United States. Or think about the super PAC created in 2010 by the DC Circuit. In 2012, 132 Americans gave 60% of the money that went to those super PACs. That's about the same number of people as they're named Adolf in the United States. So whether it's Lesterland or Sheldon City or Adolfia, the point is it is a tiny, tiny fraction of the 1% that dominate this critical first stage of our democracy. So we, too, have a two-stage democracy. In the second stage, all citizens get to vote, if you're over 18 in some states, if you have an ID. But in the first stage, we don't have a white primary. We have a green primary, a green primary. And you must do well in the green primary in order to run in the general election. You don't necessarily have to win. There is Jerry Brown. But the point is most campaign managers tell their candidates, we must win the green primary. You must work to win the green primary if we're gonna have a shot in the general election. But in this tweetest democracy, it's not a minority that's being excluded. It is the majority, the vast majority, excluded from this critical first step. And the consequence is to produce this democracy responsive to the funders only. It's an incredible study by Princeton, but I'm not allowed to talk about Princeton studies, so I put that off the stage really quickly, by Martin Gillins and Ben Page. The largest empirical study of policy decisions, actual policy decisions by our government in the history of political science, relating what our government did to the views of the economic elite, organized interests, and the average voter. So the economic elite, this graph pretty obvious, right? So from the left to the right is the percentage of the economic elite to support a policy, and going up is the probability the policy gets passed. So as more support the policy from the economic elite, the probability of it being passed goes up. Same with organized interests. As the percentage or the number of these organized interest groups support something, the probability of it passing goes up. Here's the vote for the average citizen. That's called a flat line, flat line. What that says is, regardless of the percentage of average citizens who support something, it doesn't affect the probability that it will be passed. It's only if we happen to agree with what the economic elite want, that you're gonna see that going up. The average voter has no statistical effect on the actual policies that our government passes. In English, this is what they summarize when the preferences of the economic elites stands of organized interest groups are controlled for. The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near zero, statistically non-significant impact on public policy. They call this a democracy. But this is what the numbers show. And we can see it over time. Here's an incredible graph by Professor Chinova at Bard College. So this is distribution of average income growth. I'm gonna give you one example to make clear what this is showing. The blue graph bar shows you the percentage of the average income growth during a recovery that went to the bottom 90%. And the red bar is the percentage that went to the top 10%. So right here you could say, well the bottom 90% got 80% of the average income growth. The top 10% got 20%. He might think that's good or bad, whatever. But that's where we start in 1949 to 1953. Here's how it goes over time. So then in the last cycle, the percentage taken by the top 10% is greater than 100%. They're collecting from earlier cycles to get more than 100% and the bottom blue bar is the bottom 90% who get less after this cycle than they did before. Now this graph has been challenged, Forbes Magazine challenged it, surprise, surprise. But the basic lesson here is absolutely established that there is a point in our history recently in the 1970s, mid-1970s, where the division of rewards in our economy splits no longer going to everybody, but increasingly going to the top, top slice of America. And as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pearson put it in their incredibly important book, the reason for this shift is changes in government policy. Changes in government policy. And the reason for changes in government policy is the lesson Boss Tweed taught us more than 100 years ago. Now of course, this is not the Tweedism of Hong Kong. It's not a pro-Beijing business and political elite. It's just a business and economic elite, no pro-Beijing involved. But that's the reality of the democracy we now have. It is just as extreme as the Beijing. 0.05% is those who give just $2,500. 0.01% is those who give $10,000 or more. So you tell me what you think a significant amount is to be relevant. But the point is it's just as wrong to the ideals of a democracy. Now, what's the consequence of this? What does it do? So I became focused on this problem in the context of copyright. I became convinced that copyright was out of tune on October 27, 1998. That was a day, some might remember, when Congress passed and the president signed a law in honor of this great America, the Sunny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. An act which extended the term of existing copyrights by 20 years. Now the question Congress was to be asking when it passed this statute was, did it advance the public good to extend the term of an existing copyright by 20 years? When we took this case to the Supreme Court challenging this extension, we had a brief signed by a bunch of economists, including five Nobel Prize winners, including this left wing, I'm sorry, this is right wing Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winning economist, who said he would only sign the brief arguing that it didn't advance the public good to extend the term of existing copyright if the word no brainer was somewhere in the brief. So obvious was it that you couldn't advance the public good by extending the reward for already created works. But apparently there were no brains in this place when Congress unanimously passed the extension of existing copyrights. What there was was more than $6 million from Disney and related corporations eager to fight to extend the term of existing copyright. Now that was the 90s and the early 2000s, but many of us, including Aaron, believed that when this man came to office, things would change. And in important ways it did. For the issues you care about most, open education, the Obama administration has been an incredibly important change, pushing for the idea of freely licensed material because of incredible people like Hal Plotkin in the middle of that government pushing to make this make sense. But in the broad sweep of policies affecting copyright, like so much of the Obama administration, it was the same but only worse than what had happened before. Washington Post describes what they think of as a source of this continued distortion. Here's why Obama trade negotiators pushed the interest of Hollywood and drug companies. One picture, the revolving door, they say, because as they observed, so many people from the US trade office, spin from the US trade office into these private spaces. So as the article says, since the turn of the century, at least a dozen US trade representative officials have taken jobs with pharmaceutical companies, filmmakers, record labels, and technology companies in favor of stronger pattern of copyright protections. As Jamie Love puts it, what's the next job that everyone at USTR has? It's working for some industry or trade group. And the claim of this article is that the consequence of this is that the United States pushes on the rest of the world a particularly extreme version of copyright. It's not the American version of copyright, it's the American version tweaked to be more extreme. As they say, it's a bit of a fun house mirror of American copyright law. Not all provisions of US law are exported with equal enthusiasm. When it comes to provisions of US law that are favorable to rights holders, American negotiators have fought to require other countries to ape US law in great detail. But when it limits copyright or patent holders rights, the language favored by the US tends to be more abstract and open-ended. The limits, fair use, or limits about the ability to import re-importation are removed while the protections are reinforced. And no place is more extreme to me, kind of crazy to me, than this fight over what's called the temporary copy. Copyright law regulates what we think of as copies. But we should remember there's a history to copyright law which made that regulation relatively benign. This is from my book published 10 years ago now, Free Culture. If you think about all the uses of copyright, copyrighted work, think of a book. In physical space, a significant chunk of those uses are just technically unregulated. So you do read a book. It's not a fair use of the book, it's a free use of the book. Because to read a book is not to produce a copy. To give someone a book is not a fair use of the book, it's a free use because to give somebody a book is not to produce a copy. To sell a book is explicitly exempted after the first sale from the regulation of copyright law. It's not a fair use, it's a free use. To sleep on a book, totally permitted in every jurisdiction around the world without triggering copyright law because there is no copy produced. The point is these are unregulated uses and then at the core there's a set of regulated uses regulated to create the incentives for authors to produce great new work. And then in the American tradition there's this thin sliver of exceptions to those regulated uses, things called fair uses, uses which otherwise would have been regulated but for the protections of fair use that exempt that regulation. So the point is there's a balance between regulated and unregulated uses in the physical space. Even though copyright law was triggered on the production of a copy, that was the reality in physical space. Okay, but enter digital where everything you do produces a copy and all of a sudden the copyright lawyers say, oh, we have a new presumption here. Everything you do is presumptively regulated. Presumptively regulated. Even though it was not always so, that's what copyright law tried to do, copyright didn't even regulate copies for the whole history of copyright law. As 1790 statute said, the sole right of liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing, inventing. Then in 1909 the word copy was inserted but in 1909 nobody was thinking about computers or even Xerox machines as Lyman Ray Patterson, one of the greatest copyright scholars in our history puts it. In fact it was probably a mistake that the word copy was inserted there because it was referring to a different idea with respect to statues. So the point is it's a mistake to insert it but once it's inserted the lawyers grab that word and they say anytime you've got a copy we've got a trigger of copyright law and therefore the application of copyright law and therefore do you have a license for what you're doing even if the copy is temporary? Meaning you send an email with an image from your computer to somebody else's and it passes through 30 servers on the way each one of those temporary copies under this extreme version of copyright law triggers copyright law and you have to ask are they all licensed? Now most people through the 2000s thought this was just an absurd position to take and that the law should at least back away from this but this too Obama is pushing in the latest negotiations the temporary copy do trigger copyright law even though no Supreme Court decision yet has authorized this as even the interpretation of American law. Now the point is the law here is constantly bending towards Hollywood not because of the revolving door. It's bending towards Hollywood because of a reality that everyone gets. After Aaron and his army stopped SOPA, Chris Dodd who is now the chairman of the MPAA was a big famous senator from Connecticut who promised when he left the Senate he would not become a lobbyist and he insists he's not a lobbyist he's just the head of the biggest lobbying organization for Hollywood. When he was so furious about the defeat of SOPA he got on television and said you know these politicians need to recognize if they want us they need to help us and people said oh it's a grotesque the idea that he would so explicitly say that in exchange for passing legislation Hollywood would be giving money that's just not done nobody would do something like that but of course everybody knew it was true he had just overstated he had been too transparent about this reality that's what's true and what that means is that especially a democratic administration is gonna be incredibly sensitive to how what it does affects the interest of those who fund it so dramatically and that's in fact what Hollywood does. No but what's interesting is it's not always true with respect to copyright issues especially the issues you care most about right now. Sure many of you were aware of the fight that was involved with the question raised in the 2012 Appropriations Act of whether the Department of Labor could deliver on its promise to require that the $500 million it was spending for open education resource material be CC by licensed. And there's this provision section 124 that was part of the bill for a while that said that basically the department had to make an evaluation of whether any of the material that was commissioning would conflict with any material that actually existed out there or any material that was in the process of being created out there by a proprietary company and if it would conflict they couldn't support it which would basically mean there would be no open education material supported because these companies would say no no we're gonna do that we're gonna do that we're gonna do that of course we're gonna charge lots of money for it and you don't have any rights over it but we're gonna do that. So this would have killed open education in the context of that incredible spending that the Department of Labor did. But after the national review raised a problem with this idea namely that home schoolers would not be able to take advantage of this material they quickly backed off and this provision disappeared from the law and so the restriction on open education was not yet implemented. So what is this? Is this a proof that the system is not as powerful or corrupted as Erin and others and I have worried? I think it's proof that you're not yet big enough, important enough to threaten them enough that they deploy their power powerfully enough against what you're trying to do. But just you wait. Just you wait because here too the interests are organizing effectively to push back against what this incredibly important movement is doing. Now when you experience this when you watch as we did in the open and the free culture movement the defeats the defeats the defeats it's natural to think this is just something about us something about what we want they're against us but the important thing to recognize is this is not just about you. There's equal opportunity crazy here when we think about policies our government does or doesn't adopt and that's because of something fundamental about what's happened that I've described. You can think about our government as a representative democracy not a pure democracy a complicated democracy. So think about it as kind of the Swiss watch of democracies all these systems of checks and balances built in by our framers but what we've done is we've allowed honey to be poured in the middle of that Swiss watch and as your intuition suggests when that happens that stops the ability of this system to function in any rational way because of the system of funding elections because what this means what this tiny fraction of the 1% means is that a tiny number of them really a tiny tiny number that's as small as I could make it have the ability to block sensible reform and what that means is that change whether it's change of any kind whether it's from the left or the right or from the sensible middle will fail because there's such an easy opportunity to block that kind of reform that change including your kind of change. Francis O'Giama describes the United States as a vetoocracy, as in veto, a vetoocracy because what he says is we've developed a government it's trivially easy now to block any change because of the extreme funding we've allowed to be concentrated in these large funders and what that means is sane policy not just about copyright is not possible until we change how campaigns are funded. We are like the bus driver who has lost the ability to steer the bus. It's been disconnected because our part the democracy part is not the part that matters. Now this is a story about power. It's not about persuasion. It's about changing power not just about becoming more persuasive. Right so then what's the solution? The solution, the obvious solution here is right we gotta change the way campaigns are funded. We gotta spread it so it's not just the 0.05% who are funding but it's a vast majority of people who are funding to spread out the funder interest so that it's not just the tweeds who are funding the campaigns and to do this what we need to do is simply pass one statute one statute that would decentralize campaign funding this is the thing you gotta keep in your head centralized system versus a decentralized system a system where one or two people are powerful or the people system where lots of people are powerful and there are lots of ways to decentralize the funding there are matching fund proposals John Sarbanes governed by the People Act would make just those small contributions get matched up to nine to one so you can afford to run winning campaigns taking small contributions only Republicans push the idea of vouchers everybody gets a small voucher maybe 50 maybe 100 maybe $200 which they use to fund campaigns the point is both of these systems would decentralize the funding of campaigns making politicians responsive to the many rather than responsive to the few both of them would kill the effective veto that is in our system today this is the obvious and first answer that we as a democracy should be rallying around so why don't we do it? What explains the failure we have had again and again why is there no solution to this problem? Well if you talk to the pundits especially in the Beltway they say you know the people don't care people don't care about this I ran a group called May Day which was trying to elect people to Congress through campaigns focused on this issue our objective was to try to demonstrate that in fact this issue could move voters of course we got caught up in the tsunami which was the 2014 election but the point is we were focused on this and getting people to talk about it when we didn't elect the candidates there was some pretty nasty press out there political kind of gloated on the failure that we had had they referred to me as a egg head and the Rick Wilson this is the name's Rick Wilson but his Twitter handle is the Rick Wilson had this quote at the end of this article it's a zero issue campaign finance no one cares they shrug they already believe that all politicians are corrupt assholes it's baked into the cake they get it they get it now I'm sorry so you just have to take a costume change because with you I can be a little bit wrong obviously I'm an egghead there's no doubt about that part so this part of the story is completely true and I don't mean to deny that at all but here's the thing can I take this off now? here's the thing that Rick Wilson confuses the question is not do they get it the people do they get it we get it we all get it the question is will we do something about it and when we don't do something about it it's not because we like it we did a poll last year asking how important is it to you that the influence of money and politics be reduced the answer was 96% of Americans said it was important it's not because we like it it's because we're resigned to it the next question on that poll was how likely is it that the influence of money and politics will be reduced 91% said not likely we resign ourself to this system so just like most of us at least 96% of us wish we could fly like Superman because 91% are pretty confident we don't we don't leap off of tall buildings regularly this is just what it means to grow up to accept the realities of modern life so we've tweaked a bit Ben Franklin's slogan nothing is certain but death and taxes and a corrupt government these are the truths of modern reality but that forces us to answer to think about the question Erin forced me to think about how do we resist this resign how do we resist how do we push back against resign I think there are three steps first is to talk about feasible change there's a big movement to amend the constitution and that's an exciting movement because it rallies people to this cause but then most of the people who get rallied think whoa wait amend the constitution that's not going to happen so I'm going to go back to TV because if you don't think it's possible why get involved so we've got to focus on feasible change and that's why we need to think about a statute first the statute like what I was describing the decentralized funding which would radically change the influence of the big funders in Washington second we need to focus on ideals that inspire people here ideals about who we are the sort of language that this boy pushed the sort of thing that motivated him to do the dumbest thing he ever did to download academic material presumptively to make it openly accessible to the rest of the world but most important for you is we have to find a way to teach to teach this and it's here that I come to recruit you now I don't mean to recruit you the way Aaron recruited me to give up what you're doing and focus only on this not that much because that would be too much what you're doing is extremely important and what you're pushing is incredibly valuable to many many causes not just obviously the cause of reforming the law of copyright so I don't want all of your time I want at least a tenth of your time I want you to tithe I want you to tithe for this from 10% of your efforts your cycles have got to be focused on this underlying problem because if you're going to make the world better we have to first make it possible to make the world better and the critical thing we need to recognize and talk about openly is the only way we're going to do that the first step to doing that not the last step but the first step is to change the way these campaigns are funded this is one more point before we stop here so as I thought about coming back and talking to you I thought about how this movement is an inspiration to me because against all odds against an incredible amount of money you're fighting for something that makes sense something important and something that makes sense now that's not to say that many in this movement are optimistic that we're going to change things dramatically anytime soon but I think what we need to discover to talk about is not how we have to be optimistic but we need to rediscover a special different sense of the word hope I don't mean the kind of abused and somewhat hopeless sense of our friend the president Barack Obama I mean a sense of hope given to us by a different president Vaclav Havel this is what hope was for Vaclav Havel hope is a state of mind not of the world it is a dimension of the soul it is not prognostication it is an orientation of the spirit and an orientation of the heart hope is not the same as joy that things are going well or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success but rather an ability to work for something because it is good hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism it is not the conviction that something will turn out well but certainly that something makes sense now the truth is something does make sense here I think this republic makes sense I think what the ideals it has come to embrace after generations of fighting for it makes sense but what you're fighting for too makes sense here you need to fight for what would make your sensible idea possible in this sensible republic what would make your sensible idea possible to make it possible for this obviousness to become part of culture and of law and to do that you need to learn as the title mysteriously suggested to walk while chewing gum and maybe tweeting at the same time which means you've got to give me at least 10% of your cycles thank you very much so I'm happy to take questions I've been told I should take questions I'm a law professor so I cold call on people so if you don't have any right away yes so my thought was on your first point that as educators maybe that's the assumption that my first shot is trying to educate the 20 year old friends to think a little bit critically in our world today so that I can potentially possibly actually change the things you're talking about I think that's exactly right and it's part of what is so inspiring to me about the Hong Kong story because remember the people who showed up first in Hong Kong streets were kids literally there were elementary school students among the other students who sat down in that protest and it was then the parents who kind of felt embarrassed that they were letting the kids do all the work and then the Occupy Central showed up and turned it into the incredible protest it was so you got to find a way to give kids motivation here and part of what might motivate them is to get them to recognize the way in which every problem every serious problem we're talking about is a problem that's going to affect them not us really you think about climate change it's a bad problem but it's not going to really matter to me 50 years old, 53 years old I'm getting long gone before it matters it's going to matter to them the debt literally borrowing from them will be long gone before they find a way to deal with that problem the economy that doesn't grow for the worst people of my age kind of settled things are going to be okay but for them this is devastating or the opportunities to create in a way that's not regulated insanely by the law these are problems I don't suffer but it's their way of living the point is to get them to recognize that each of these issues is about them first we've broken the democracy it hurts them and then maybe there's a motivation and begin to think about an opportunity a way for them to step up and do something about it I think that's the only way this works it's only ever worked like that and it will only work this way because for us it's easy for us just to sit this one out because it's really hard for us to imagine how to fix it yeah I love the sunny bono photo of course we all know how important the pop music is for the preservation of humankind but giving back to your large framework that you presented where in there is is there protection for artists beyond copyright law that's already stated and an example you could look to China or you could look to Vietnam where there is basically no copyright law and original creative artists in those countries basically don't exist why? because when they produce something it's being sold on the street one week later for a dollar so this is a really important point the way this debate was characterized for much of the history of the debate it was as if it was a fight between those who believed in copyright and those who opposed copyright and part of what Creative Commons was trying to do was to show that there's a really important space in the middle people who believe in copyright but also believe that as artists they or creators they want people to share or build upon their creativity in ways different from the kind of Hollywood all rights reserved model and that move was originally intended to be just a kind of thought experiment then people like Aaron came along and turned it into something real but the point was it was to get people to recognize what in some sense is obvious of course but then what that points to is the recognition that what we need is not to abolish copyright but to update it into a digital world to make it make sense of the objective of giving support to artists and creators that they need without being insane which is what it is right now when it tries to report to regulate every single copy so it's an invitation it's a command that we've got to find a way to make it make sense in the 21st century and my point dumping on Obama's administration here is that in the one place we thought there was an opportunity to begin to have that conversation they haven't had that conversation they're talking about how do we double down on making the 19th, 18th, 17th century copyright law forced on top of 21st century technology the temporary copy is just the most extreme example of this and instead of having that we ought to be engaging in the kind of conversation that people like Pam Samuelson or others in this debate have been having about how do we update the system to make it make sense in the 21st century and your question is exactly the key question here how do we make sure artists get compensated but there's two questions here how do we make sure artists get compensated but how do we also make sure that the law doesn't over-regulate so that people who want to share and build upon creativity consistent with what the artist wants don't find themselves felons or don't need to turn their students into felons when they want them to engage in that kind of creativity too yeah as you know in the European Commission there's an instrument that works for the last few months which is potentially society and my question is should we focus the muscles on harmonizing such instrumentations or should we push for more radical reduction of material protection? yeah I think you need to walk and chew gum here too I think we need to do both and you're right I'm thinking as countries like Britain which have had a series of major reports Hardgrave's reports the most recent which have been really critical reports on the nature of copyright and the role and the important need for updating copyright and certain clear principles like never extend the term of existing copyright but even there the Hardgrave's report reports on how American companies went and tried to lobby them to back off of some of these sensible positions so it's interesting in other countries they don't have the same perversion that we have in this country because of you know I think the way in which we're funding our campaigns that makes it more possible but not yet ideal because Europe is not necessarily the most innovative thinkers about copyright either this is why I think what's most important is what's happening in the developing world in Brazil and in India as they become part of this conversation and so we do need to have a conversation which is international recognizing the many different interests in this international fight to bring about a kind of balance and the extremism of America needs to be checked and it will only be checked by recognizing this is an international international question this is the critical thing you know what's bizarre about copyright is that there are 100 years to harmonize copyright and we achieved a kind of harmonized regime just at the time the internet comes up so we achieved the harmonized regime which was also the wrong regime for the internet but by harmonize what this means is that we've made it illegal for countries to experiment with differences so if you now experiment and have a different kind of copyright protection from what this international trips organization agreement suggest you should have you can be found liable you can be punished through fines for deviating so just at the moment when we need lots of experimentation we've locked down this old regime and so I think we need to recognize that doesn't make sense and push for something that does make sense and the international forum is the only place in which it's going to happen yeah one more question I'd like to address the 20 year old kid comment so there are lots of 24 year old kids who are interested in the years want to change stuff I spent it again with 150 of them you just have to find them and bring them into the center for conversation but the question I think what can non-USS students do to help made-apac uh so what can you do to help made-apac you can help spread the idea that's all we can't take your support to help elect candidates and the next stage of made-apac is actually going to be about how do we persuade voters to persuade their existing congressman to take up the charge so that all sorts of help would be incredibly important to that but your first point I think is really critical it's about giving sovereignty back to kids in this debate you know and in some sense bringing more in it's wonderful to see you the people who stood up who were from that generation here that was an exciting part it's always been part of this fight that was Aaron was part of this fight at a very young age but I think that's the only way we get it so to educators I say it's not just about educating us it's about educating all about the incredible role that you play so thank you thanks very much