I just discovered a series of clips on YouTube featuring a presentation given by Stanford Law professor and founder of Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig, about his book “Free Culture” and have created a playlist of them.

It’s a fascinating look into the history of copyright law and why openness is so important.

Unfortunately embedded YouTube clips are currently breaking the entire page here for users of Internet Explorer, so rather than embed the playlist I’ll have to just refer you to YouTube for now. Click on the image below to go to the playlist.

UPDATE: A little while ago I watched all 4 clips in the series – one right afte the other – and in the wake of this felt compelled to do my part to ensure Lessig’s message is shared more widely.  Therefore after spending some time working out a process, I’ve managed to convert all 4 video clips into a single downloadable audio recording.

Out of courtesy I’ve also devoted some time to looking for any signs (explicit or inferred) that this presentation may carry restrictions on reuse or remixing – not surprisingly the licenses I have found are Creative Commons ones that support reuse.

Lessig’s website features a long list of audio and video recordings – including a text-to-MP3 translation of the transcript for the same keynote – all of which are shared under a Creative Commons (Attribution: 3.0) License (US). Therefore I feel fairly secure in the idea that there are no problems re-distributing this recording under the same license.

“Remember the Refrain”

Throughout the keynote Lessig refers back to the refrain he introduces during the first minute of the talk.  In the YouTube clips the refrain is visually displayed each time it’s referenced, however it’s not always stated out loud.  So for reference, I’m including the four concepts below:

1. Creativity and innovation always builds on the past
2. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it
3. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past
4. Ours is less and less a free society

Formats:

I’ve exported the recording as both MP3 and OGG Vorbis formats, each of which are available below.

• MP3 version (29 MB) [podcast]http://techticker.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/free-culture-full.mp3[/podcast]

• OGG version (20 MB): Free Culture – Lawrence Lessig
• Transcript: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2002/08/15/lessig.html

Workflow

Finally, in the interests of transparency and respect for open source purists, I wanted to include the work flow process I used to ultimately produce the OGG version.  I relied upon as much open source software as I could (as always), however there are two notable exceptions that I’d like to menition. Namely, the process was conducted on Windows XP and included the MP4 codec during the initial rip from YouTube.

1. Download videos as MP4’s from YouTube (http://au.youtube.com/user/DavidRGilson) via Greasemonkey plugin for Firefox and “Download YouTube Videos as MP4″ script
2. Rip and convert audio from MP4 to OGG Vorbis via VLC media player
3. Merge OGG files into a single file via Audacity
4. Export as OGG Vorbis; Export as MP3