22 Sep 2011
Joi Ito, recipient of an OII Lifetime Achievement Award and director of the MIT Media Lab, discusses his career as an Internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and activist. Ito describes how his entrepreneurial career focused on the shift from mainstream media to the Internet, having helped pioneer the disruption of mainstream media in Japan, and even relates how he built the first Yahoo Japan data server. He then recounts the history of his association with Creative Commons–as he describes, an organisation that generated a middle ground between pirating and pro-copyright factions–which thereafter converted him into an activist for an open Internet. Ito ends by discussing the lessons learned during his career as well as his thoughts regarding possible future technological advances.