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Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and
Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig to Speak at the New York Public
Library, Thursday April 7
Pair to Explore the Topics of Copyright, Downloading and File-sharing
in an Evening Called Who Owns Culture?, moderated by Steven Johnson
New York, NY, March 15, 2005 -- 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 directed by Paul Holdengräber.
The program will be held in the Celeste Bartos Forum in the Humanities and
Social Sciences Library, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, at 7:00 P.M.
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." Tickets for the event go on sale
on March 17 at 10 am through Smarttix (212-868-4444 or smarttix.com).
Tickets are $10.00 for General Admission ($7 for Library donor groups).
About LIVE from the NYPL LIVE from the NYPL is the
new name for Public Programs at The New York Public Library. Expect conversations,
real debates, performances, readings, and much more. Bookmark www.nypl.org/live
and email live@nypl.org.
About the Panel
Lawrence Lessig is a professor at Stanford Law School. He represented website
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 donor groups.
