Lawrence Lessig: The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge

Lecture at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, 18 April 2011: A new talk about open access to academic or scientific information, with a bit of commentary about YouTube Copyright School. ;

Lawrence Lessig: Thank you very much. It's extremely cool to be here.

It's just about as cool as when I spoke at Pixar.

I think of these two as being highlights of my career (check).

So, thank you very much for having me.

I have two small ideas I want to use as an introduction to an argument,

about the nature of access to scientific knowledge in the context of the internet,

and use that argument as a step towards a plea about what we should do.

So here is the first idea.

I want to call it the "White-effect".

And I name that after Justice Byron White, justice of the US Supreme Court,

appointed by John F. Kennedy - here he is in 1962