[ Thanks to Jason
Greenwood for this link. ]
“The high-tech community in general and Silicon Valley in
particular have been ‘pathetic’ when it comes to fighting the
prevailing ‘extremist’ political view in Washington that
open-source software is a threat to strong intellectual property
rights, according to Stanford University law professor Lawrence
Lessig.“These extremists have created an intellectual property
‘McCarthyism’ that projects the view that ‘if you support the idea
of the public domain or free and open-source software, then you
must be basically Red,’ said Lessig at the Open Source Business
Conference here. Lessig argued that balanced national copyright
policy is the best way to promote innovation.“In 1976 Congress revised the copyright laws in a way that has
given large, established software, media and content producers
tighter control over intellectual property rights, Lessig said. The
law, he said, has made it more difficult than ever for innovators
to build on earlier work even as the Internet has made it easier
for people to create and distribute new technologies, content and
knowledge…”