The role of discourse in the university

So, tonight I attended a variety of lectures across the campus.

First, I attended Mark Rose's talk entitled "Nine-Tenths of the Law: The English Copyright Debates and the Rhetoric of the Public Domain." (Also see the Duke Law Review article of the same name)

Rose gave an overview of the English government's flip-flops on whether copyright should be considered property with perpetual rights. (Some of the same cases are discussed in Lessig's books.) More interestingly, Rose then discussed how there has been a lack of how to properly frame discussions of public domain. There really haven't been any codified notions of what it means to have something in the public domain.

Rose mentioned that one approach to advocating the public domain is to follow the lessons of the environmental movement (oh, boy). His point is that we need to identify that there are real problems with the copyright law and form alliances with people who might not seem our allies (at first) in order to see real change. For example, the environmentalists partnered with hunters who wanted clean game. The advice seems much the same as Lessig: we need to organize and educate in order to change the law. It won't happen otherwise.

Then, I went over and listened to a debate entitled "America's Foreign Policy: Unilateralism vs. Multilateralism: (Should We Have Listened to France?)" with Professor William Schonfeld (who gives fantastic lectures) and Dr. Yaron Brook from the Ayn Rand Institute.

In short, the only thing I can say is that this reaffirmed my fundamental position that there is no right or wrong in politics. I agreed and disagreed with both speakers on certain points. You need to listen to all of the evidence and then come to your own conclusions.

And, I bet that's the best lesson a university can teach their students...

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Does the planet need Gump?

I think the real rationale behind Planet Apache is to explore the social expanse of the ASF community not to get automated messages. So, my question to ya'll is does having a RSS feed of Gump add value? I don't think so.

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