News: Why Larry Lessig gets an "F" in copyrights
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.

Since then, Lessig--nowadays working at Stanford University--made a name writing and expounding on the danger posed by powerful, entrenched interests in using copyright law to choke innovation and halt the sharing and distribution of copyrighted works online.

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.

"When the system protects Hemingway, we at least get to see how Hemingway writes. We get to learn about his style and the tricks he uses to make his work succeed. We can see this because it is the nature of creative writing that the writing is public. There is no such thing as language that conveys meaning while not simultaneously transmitting its words.

"Software is different," he continues. "Software gets compiled, and the compiled code is essentially unreadable; but in order to copyright software, the author need not reveal the source code."

That results in an unfair social arrangement, according to Lessig, who believes that coders (or more likely, the companies they work for) get to enjoy decades of copyright protection (70-plus years) while the public gets nary little in return.

And then punctuating his prose with a professorial flourish, Lessig dismisses this as "a bastardization of the Constitution's requirement that copyright be for 'limited times.'"

Lessig would limit software copyrights to 10 years. After that, the code would wind up in the public domain. I can't think of a better prescription for formalizing the existing constellation of power that favors the Microsofts and Oracles over the small and independent developers.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107-955022.html