SCL is delighted to announce that Professor Lawrence Lessig has agreed to give the SCL Lecture 2008 at the Institution of Engineering and Technology, Savoy Place, London on 30 April at 6.30 pm. This is an event which is sure to be thought-provking and make all think outside their ‘safe’ areas. It is likely to be of considerable interest to many in the IT industry as well as being an interesting event for IT lawyers.
Full details of the event will be posted on the SCL site when available and there will be an opportunity to book online. The date has been revised from the original date of 28 February.
Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and a Professor at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court. Professor Lessig represented web site operator Eric Eldred in the ground-breaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. He has won numerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Award, and was named one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Visionaries, for arguing ‘against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online’.
Professor Lessig is the author of Free Culture (2004), The Future of Ideas (2001) and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999). He chairs the Creative Commons project, and serves on the board of the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Public Library of Science, and Public Knowledge. He is also a columnist for Wired. He earned a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a JD from Yale.
The lecture is dedicated to the memory of Alan Brakefield, Honorary Treasurer of the Society for 29 years and a founding member in 1973, who died in July. Alan was a tireless servant of the Society. His commitment to the challenges of IT and the law was reflected in years of hard work administering the finances of the Society and of his wise counsel to successive Trustees.
