Update: CNET News: Why Larry Lessig Gets an "F" in Software

"Lawrence Lessig first came to public attention a few years ago when U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, then presiding over the Microsoft antitrust case, invited him down from Harvard as a special master...

"This was all of a piece with the spirit of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization Lessig helped create with the laudable idea of Lessig would limit software copyrights to ten years. After that, the code would wind up in the public domain. creating a 'property conservancy' that, among other things, would "protect works of special public value from exclusionary private ownership." Some of the works would presumably be donated, others would be bought from the creators. Nothing untoward there.

"But Lessig is also going further. In his latest book, 'The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World,' he draws a distinction between the intellectual property developed by, say, an Ernest Hemingway, and the intellectual property created by a code jockey..."

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CNET News: Red Hat CTO: Lessig Got It Right

"In response to the Aug. 23 Perspectives column by Charles Cooper, 'Why Larry Lessig gets an "F" in software':

"Software may not have existed when the Constitution was drafted, but patents were designed to cover 'the state of the art' at that time. Notice that patents were patently open: A patent was only granted when designs and methods were described in sufficient detail that somebody 'sufficiently skilled in the arts' could completely understand, if not themselves replicate, the invention..."

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Related Stories:

• Reiser: MS Settlement Reflects Deep Failure To Understand Implications of Patching Technology(Jan 30, 2002)
• Lawrence Lessig's Testimony on the Microsoft-DOJ Settlement Posted(Dec 13, 2001)
• InfoWorld: [Open Source is] Already a contender(Oct 31, 2001)
• NewsForge: Free Software leaders: We'll beat the proprietary system, but we need your help(Oct 12, 2001)