Sign In

Larry Lessig packing his bag for Auckland

Prof Larry Lessig, the foundation Creative Commons hero , and now creative and legal impresario should be packed and ready to go for Auckland, New Zealand LIANZA conference this coming week. If you want to hear him you will need to register for the conference, at least for the day he speaks.

Public Seminar – Keeping culture free
However, good old Auckland University and University Law School have organised for Prof Lessig to give a public session at the University of Auckland from 6.30pm – 8.30pm, Monday 3rd November.

His topic is “Keeping culture free: the choices law and technology force us to make about the future of the Internet and the progress of cultures”

The venue for this is the new Owen G Glenn Business School building at 12 Grafton Rd.

Turn up early if you want to get in. This is a very popular man with a message all of us might like to hear – i.e. we need to stop criminlising our children and develop a digital copyright frameworks which works for all parties.

More on LIANZA
The full LIANZA programme is over here. There is a Twitter Tweme here. A what? A Tweme is a mix of twittier posts on a common purpose/event/subjet – explanation, here.

APN
My friends/colleagues on the APN are putting together a stand at the conference. Just out is an evaluation report.

Open Access – Open Data NZ
This years conference also has a presentation from Keitha Booth of SSC and Andrew Matangi of Buddle Fiindlay. They are co-leads to a project to open up access to New Zealand public information and encourage its re-use to benefit both citizens and the NZ economy.

The project’s vision is “Open government data to enable our digital future”. The project will report to the NZ Cabinet on impediments and how to remove or overcome them and will recommend new government information policy and approaches to achieve the vision.

These will include copyright, licensing, funding, pricing and the use of technology to enable exposure, discoverability and remixing of open government data.

This is a work programme of the Digital Strategy 2.0, released in August 2008, and the commitment to make “public information accessible to everyone. Information should be available in the way you want it, when you want it”.

Tom Steinberg – My Society
This open data open access agenda is a very big deal across all jurisdictions. As noted before on this blog, one of the cheer leaders for this is Tom Steinberg of MySociety UK.

Be advised, there is a very solid possibility that he might be out in New Zealand early next year for a visit/lecture. Fingers crossed.

If so, ’tis to be hoped we can surprise and delight him with the news that the newly ensconced government (of whatever hue) has already announced their intention to give NZ one of the most robust and enlightened e-democracy frameworks in the OECD : and as a result, there is already evidence of a myriad of open data projects being planned which which will see New Zealand taking real global leadership at all levels of e-democracy.

Naturally to achieve that we will have also transformed our entire understanding of how to run a 21st digital intellectual property regime.
Prof Lessig speaking at TED, here.

Related Posts