Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Prior to rejoining the Harvard faculty, Lessig was a professor at Stanford Law School, where he founded the school’s Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court.Lessig serves on the Board of Creative Commons, MAPLight, Brave New Film Foundation, The American Academy, Berlin, AXA Research Fund and iCommons.org, and on the the advisory board of the Sunlight Foundation. He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Association, and has received numerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Award, Fastcase 50 Award and being named one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Visionaries.Lessig holds a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a JD from Yale.
It’s hard to believe that it was 13 years ago today that we shipped the very first version of the CC license suite. Before then, without the CC licenses, the barriers to collaborating in a global commons were too high. The benefits of shared educational content or scientific research, or paving the way for creators … Read More “Happy Birthday CC license suite!”
Help build the next era of sharing online.Make a donation to Creative Commons. 12 years ago today, we launched the first Creative Commons license suite. The internet was changing the way people share, and changing what it meant to be a creator. But copyright law hadn’t caught up. The Net was making sharing easy; the … Read More “Happy birthday, Creative Commons”
Lawrence Lessig at ETech 2008 / Ed Schipul / CC BY-SA I am thrilled to welcome Ryan Merkley as the incoming CEO of Creative Commons. This is an important moment in the history of the organization. After eleven years, CC licenses are globally recognized as the definitive tool for sharing creative works. Millions across the … Read More “A message from Larry: A new CEO and a challenge to the CC community”
Lawrence Lessig and Aaron Swartz (2002) / Rich Gibson / CC BY Friends and Commoners, It is with incredible sadness that I write to tell you that yesterday, Aaron Swartz took his life. Aaron was one of the early architects of Creative Commons. As a teenager, he helped design the code layer to our licenses, … Read More “Remembering Aaron Swartz”
Dear Fellow Creative Commoner: A week ago, Japan suffered its most devastating earthquake and tsunami in modern history. This disaster has left thousands of people dead, many others injured and displaced, and an estimated 1.5 million more without access to power. Furthermore, the compounding catastrophe with the country’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant will affect … Read More “Please do what you can to help Japan”
As we come to the end of this year’s fundraising campaign, I asked the organizers to let me write you to tell you about an extraordinary birthday present that Creative Commons received on its 8th birthday last Thursday. You probably know that for the past two years, Creative Commons has been incredibly fortunate to have … Read More “Welcoming Cathy Casserly as the new CEO of Creative Commons”
Last week the Wikimedia Foundation board took an important step toward giving Wikipedia the right to choose to migrate to a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Credit goes to the Wikimedia Foundation and Free Software Foundation for having the wisdom and foresight to enable this progress. However, the real work has just begun. As Wikipedia founder … Read More “Wikipedia and Creative Commons next steps”