A year ago John Moore showed us an audio/visual presentation by Lawrece Lessig from the July 24, 2002 O'Reilly Open Source Conference. Lessig's topic was "The End of Free Culture," a hair-raising review of the way in which the big publishers, the record industry, software developers (read Micro$oft), and the networks are manipulating Congress and shutting down the free exchange of creative work via indefinite extension of copyright and the infamous Digital Rights Management proposal.

The problem is still with us, as an excellent letter by Ed Weinberg to the Journal News shows. Click here to read it. We should all be contributing to the Electronic Frontier Foundation instead of just wringing our hands and telling each other how threatened we are!

Lessig's lecture is on his web page Free Culture to download the lecture in 'Flash', MP3, or text (for the bandwidth challenged, as he puts it).