 SAN FRANCISCO (WIRED Magazine/ www.wired.com) - On April 7, the New York Public Library and Wired Magazine will present musician, songwriter and author Jeff Tweedy and Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig in a discussion moderated by Wired Magazine contributing editor Steven Johnson. The engagement Who Owns Culture? will explore the artistic, commercial and legal issues that surround the Internet-enabled freeing of culture. It is part of the new series Live From the NYPL. Jeff Tweedy, whose band Wilco recently earned two Grammy awards for their current Nonesuch Records release A ghost is born has openly embraced the culture of digital downloading and file-sharing by routinely offering free downloads of live music and new music on the Wilco Web site wilcoworld.net. "A piece of art is not a loaf of bread," explains Tweedy. "When someone steals a loaf of bread from the store, that's it. The loaf of bread is gone. When someone downloads a piece of music, it's just data until the listener puts that music back together with their own ears, their mind, their subjective experience." "We need to listen more to those who teach by what they do," says Lawrence Lessig. "Jeff Tweedy, and Wilco, have done a great deal to teach all of us something important about creativity." Lessig is a professor at Stanford Law School. He represented Web site operator Eric Eldred in the groundbreaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Lessig was named one of Scientific American's Top 50 Visionaries, for arguing "against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online." He is a Wired columnist and the author of The Future of Ideas, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace and Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity.
He also chairs Creative Commons, an innovative nonprofit that offers a new approach to creativity and copyright in the digital age - an approach that respects authors' rights both to control their work and share it on their own terms. Steven Johnson is a Wired contributing editor, and the author of Mind Wide Open, Emergence, and Interface Culture. His new book, Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, will be published in May.
The New York Public Library is located at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Tickets for Who Owns Culture? are on sale March 17 at 10 am through Smarttix (212-868-4444 or Smarttix.com) and are $10.00 for General Admission and $7.00 for Library Members.
| 
