"Fight!" exhorts Professor Lawrence Lessig as he rallies the open source community in what he calls the war against monopolistic businesses. How is this war affecting the culture of innovation? How do you need to defend your right to innovate? Hear Professor Lessig lay bare with his powerful arguments the stories behind the defining milestones of this war starting with the historic 1976 Sony Betamax judgment, in his keynote talk at the OSBC 2005.

Is supporting freedom tantamount to supporting piracy? What position should you be taking on this? What roles do the congress and courts play? Are the lobbyists and lawyers even trying to solve the problems or happy to live in this candyland of every increasing litigation?

Why is free software and wireless access being hit by nearly a billion dollars of big business money? Why are the lessons of community welfare being forgotten and the bogey of the welfare state being raised? How is the symbol of anti-monopoly, the penguin, achieving its astonishing success? Is the GPL really unfair to developing nations as Jonathan Schwartz says?

Plenty of questions and passionate answers; answers that will lead to an age that you define through the technologies that you build.

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Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law and John A. Wilson Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Stanford Law School. Professor Lessig is the chairman of the board of Creative Commons, founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society and a sits on the board of directors for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Public Library of Science. In 2002, Lessig was named one of Scientific American's Top 50 Innovators, and the American Bar Association recently awarded him the Cyberspace Law Excellence Award.

Lessig teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, law and high technology, Internet regulation, comparative constitutional law, and the law of cyberspace. His book, Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace, was published by Basic Books, and The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, is available from Random House. His most recent book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, is now available online at www.free-culture.cc and from Penguin Press.

Resources:

• Lawrence Lessig's blog
• OSBC2005 Keynote details and Lessig's presentation

This program is from the Larry's World series.

For Team ITC:

• Description editor: Arun Tanksali
• Post-production audio engineer: Stuart Hunter