2004-06-10 DE Lessig warns of "IP McCarthyism"
In a speech at an opening ceremony for a university project in Karlsruhe, Germany, Lawrence Lessig (law professor at Stanford, author of various wide-read books on the information commons) warned under thundering applause that we are living in an era of "IP McCarthyism".
Lessig was also a guest speaker at the FFII conference of May 2003 in Brussels on the software patentability directive where Arlene McCarthy was the rapporteur and behaved rather aggressively toward her critics.
It can be safely assumed that the thundering applause to Lessig's newly coined phrase is in part due to negative experiences of the creative commons community with Arlene McCarthy, who has also been the shadow rapporteur for her group on various other "IP"-related directives, such as the "IP Enforcement Directive".
Previously, Lessig has spoken of "software stalinism" in similar contexts.
Hal Varian, economist from University of San Francisco, explained a model of innovation incentives and said that the patent system has reached a point where it is clearly stifling innovation in particular in fields of complex systems such as software.
