Professor 25, www.istockphoto.com

Free access to digital media -- hundreds of billions of images, movies, and other works -- has blurred the line between intellectual property and individual expression. Today the intricacies of copyright law, once the province of publishing companies and their lawyers, now bear on anyone with an internet connection.

In an SFI Community Lecture on October 5, 2011, in Santa Fe, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling explored what this shift means for the legal system, for platform owners (such as Facebook and YouTube), for digital media consumers, and for the majority of us who create new content in our digital world.

Watch her presentation (96 minutes)

Van Houweling is faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, University of California, Berkeley.

Generous support for this lecture was provided by Joe and Angie Thompson and by Los Alamos National Bank.