In comments that could lead to another place for adult amateurs to, ahem, flash their wares, copyright reformer Lawrence Lessig has suggested to Flash developers that in open source circles he has seen the enemy, and Flash is it.
"[Open source advocates] hate Flash," the Stanford University professor and Free Software Foundation board member told a gathering of developers at Flashforward2005 April 6. "They think that by participating in the Flash community, you are feeding the devil."
Lessig told the developers that the digital era has meant new demands for content sharing, which old copyright law and old media with it cannot meet, meaning "outdated" copyright law hampering creativity and learning alike.
But Lessig also calls himself a fan of Macromedia's Flash platform, and urged Flash designers and artists to free their work from outmoded copyright protections, saying Creative Commons, which he chairs, offers varieties of intellectual property licenses leaving licensees more open than "all rights reserved" does, in his view.
The paradox is that Macromedia's Flash animation software (.swf) has been open for a very long time, meaning you can create software tools producing Flash content, but the technology itself is still under Macromedia intellectual property control and Flash movies keep the source code tightly guarded.
Lessig urged Macromedia to study "the explosive growth of HTML," which opened the way for a huge Web development community by letting them literally steal from each other and expand on each other's doings, by comparison to the tight guards around AppleScript.
"It is absolutely critical," he told the Flash developers, "that we begin to support the development of free content built on proprietary platforms."
