Lessig Presentation on Google Print

I just noticed on Lessig's blog[1] that he has been figuring out how to make available his presentations to those of us who are unfortunate enough to miss the live performance. This is a Good Thing[TM]. I remember his Free Culture presentation that Leonard Lin worked up from his audio and slides in 2002 and I'm glad to see that the wait is over for more. The Free Culture presentation is a great example of how accessible Lessig makes even sometimes complicated ideas. His style is witty, informative, and compelling. He hates to be called this, but really - he is so entertaining it is hard not to think of him as a Copyright Rockstar.

Anyway, he has decided to make all the rest of his presentations available to a wider audience but is having a bit of trouble getting the process streamlined. The file for this presentation on Google Print is a 85MB torrent, which is quite large for a simple video file, but I have faith he will figure out a better way soon enough. If you get it soon, it should download very fast as the torrent is quite active (I was surprised to see that it just completed, total time about fifteen minutes).

Hm. Just trying it now, I seem to be having a strange difficulty playing the mp4 file. When I tried it in winamp, I could hear the sound but could not see the video. When I tried it in divx player, I could see the video but had error messages on the sound. The file wouldn't play at all in TheCoreMediaPlayer. Check for updates if you are interested, I'll work on it a bit and see what I can figure out. (I mess with my system a lot so you may very well have more luck than me. )


[1] If you are not familiar with Lawrence Lessig, he is a prominent figure in the fight for more reasonable copyright law.