Guest Blogger -- J.D. Lasica

We've started a new Berkman tradition -- every Tuesday Luncheon Series guest speaker will grace the Berkman homepage with a guest post.  Our first guest blogger is J.D. Lasica, who spoke about the future of journalism, his recent book, and Our Media on Tuesday, June 14.  If you missed J.D. Lasica's talk at Berkman, you can still join it -- listen to an mp3 of the event, check out Steve Garfield's interview with Lasica post-presentation, and stay tuned for J.D. Lasica's h20 playlist.  And, of course, please read what J.D. Lasica had to say about his visit to Berkman....

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Hi, folks. A quick intro. Three years ago I tuned in (via Dan Gillmor's and Larry Lessig's blogs) to the ILaw session at Berkman and found the issues being explored just fascinating.

So I decided to write a book, which came out last month. My blog readers named it Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation. And as it took shape, it became not a book about digital copyright law (which others like Lessig, Litman and Siva V. have covered so well) as much as stories about people at ground zero of the personal media revolution and how individuals and companies are adapting (or not adapting) to the sweeping changes buffeting the media landscape.

We're living in extraordinary times -- media will change more in the next five years than it has in the past 50. The question is, what will that landscape look like? How much of it will make room for us rather than more of the same from the big media companies?

The Berkman folks were kind enough to invite me here today to talk about all this -- not just "Darknet" the book and the fascinating cast of characters it explores, but also about Ourmedia.org, a project that is growing in some ways into an alternative to Hollywood entertainment. Since we launched on March 22, about 23,000 people have joined to take part in sharing and storing their works of grassroots video, audio, photos and more -- for free, forever.

We're still hard at work building out the functionalities of the site, so contact us if you'd like to help. One thing I've been kicking around with the Berkman fellows is the idea of creating a grassroots media learning center, so that any podcaster or videoblogger can easily find out the legal ramifications of including a snippet of copyrighted music in a podcast or a scene from a Hollywood movie in their own personal video. We're also thinking about how to create a right clearance center to make it easy for people to obtain permission from the studios and record labels for such usages in return for a fee.

Finally, I'd like to announce that today Charles Nesson, founder of the Berkman Center, has agreed to accept a seat on the Ourmedia Board of Advisors. Welcome, sir! And thanks to everyone at Berkman for your hospitality, and for your vigorous championing of the public's digital rights over the years.