Here's a transcript of Lawerence Lessig's keynote address at OSCon. If you want to know what he had to say (and it's good stuff) but don't want to download the complete presentation done up in Flash (which weighs in at a hefty 8.5 Mb) this is a good place to go.

The starting points from which Lessig discusses intellectual property, copyright, and why we should care, are these:

• Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.

• The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.

• Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.

• Ours is less and less a free society.