I Am Still Alive

A good profile of poet and Creative Capital co-founder Lewis Hyde:

After the lecture, as we walked across the darkened campus, I mentioned to Hyde that I had found [Lawrence] Lessig’s talk to be logical and well crafted.

“A little too well crafted, if you ask me,” Hyde said.

This took me by surprise – Hyde is a polite man who rarely speaks critically of others – and I later asked him to elaborate. “Look, Lessig is a lawyer,” he said. “I like him, I think he’s solid. But it’s a very particular way of thinking.” Hyde himself makes use of the Creative Commons, yet there’s a formality to the setup that troubles him. “All of the C.C. licenses use the lever of the law,” he said. “They have the assumption of private ownership behind them. So Lessig, in a certain sense, is confining himself to one slice of this stuff, which is not as capacious as a true commons would be.”