The Acadia Senior College notice

Here's the notice that went out to the Acadia Senior College, including placing Larry Lessig in Stamford rather than at Stanford:

Acadia Senior College: Special Event

“Pirates of the Caribbean: Mickey Mouse, Napster and the Future of Intellectual Property.”

Discussion Leader: Michael Shook, COO, AeroHydro, Inc.

Southwest Harbor Public Library, Tuesday, May 31, 2005: 6:30 – 8:30

The Founding Fathers could not anticipate the Internet. The intellectual property regime enshrined in the Constitution arose out of an enlightenment tradition that owes its roots to the Gutenberg revolution. The printing press brought about a quantum reduction in the cost of reproduction of written works. Digitized works and the Internet have brought about yet another quantum reduction in cost, this time effectively to zero.

What are the cultural and economic implications of these changes? Can media companies whose business models are built on the distribution of physical objects and the exploitation of scarce bandwidth survive? Can artists and writers make a living in this new world? Is the solution to impose artificial barriers barriers to distribution such as the broadcast flag proposed by the FCC and digital rights management schemes? Can we find meaningful parallels in the enclosure of common lands that accompanied the other mid-millennium transformations?

We will use Lawrence Lessig's recent book Free Culture as the jumping off place for discussion of these topics. Lessig is professor of law at Stanford University and has written extensively on the effects of the Internet on society and law.