Anyone interested in copyright issues in the classroom and in scholarly publishing would be wise to tune in to WILL-AM for Bob McChesney‘s “Media Matters” show this coming Sunday, August 1, at 1 p.m. CST, when Lawrence Lessig will be his guest.  Lessig always has interesting things to say about copyright laws and how they can impede creativity and scholarship.

You can also subscribe to the show’s podcast via the WILL site, catch it streaming live online, and follow the show via Facebook for more information.

Bob McChesney is a co-editor of the Press’s History of Communication series and author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy.

We all understand that this debate is complex, both legally and financially, but what isn’t discussed so much is just what it means to the public to lose its cultural memory, what this amnesia might mean w/r/t the way we negotiate the cultural present. We lose track of personal memories all the time, of course, but it would be quite another thing to say that most everything that one had ever known would suddenly be lost behind a sort of enforced forgetting. This isn’t what copyright is meant to do, and it presents the question of how a liberated approach to copyright might change our attitudes about culture and cultural production. How might a contrary position—that copyright protection should only be enforced as long as a work has relevant commercial potential, which for the vast majority of cultural stuff could be safely measured in months, not lifetimes—change our regard for the present?