Lessig

Free Press (and others) alleged that Comcast was blocking the BitTorrent application. We've known for sometime the result in this case (because of the weird practice of the FCC to release the results of an order without necessarily releasing the order). But at the crack of dawn (California time) today, the Commission released its 34 page order.

It is fantastically well done. So much so that I felt compelled (in that weird lawyer like way) to blather my own 5 pages of thanks in a letter to the Commission that will be mailed today.

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My contribution to the "Free the Airwaves" campaign, a push to free spectrum "whitespaces."

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A reaction to McCain's recently announced technology policy. (Stupidly unclear in the video: the initial graph is U.S.'s global ranking in broadband penetration -- so starting high (#5) in 2000, and declining to #22 by 2008. The rankings are based on OECD data.)

There's also a version at YouTube (but please watch in "high quality").

(I resisted the cheap shot "[sic]" at "and free to chose among broadband service providers." Will someone please get them to fix this?)

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As if the decision upholding free licenses wasn't enough for one day, a New York Supreme Court (the highest trial court in New York) has denied Yoko Ono an injunction to stop the distribution of a film that uses a clip of Lennon's Imagine. Wonderfully, the Court explicitly refuses to follow the 6th Circuit's "no de minimis" rule sound recordings, and holds that there is fair use under New York's common law copyright regime. Read the more good news here.

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So for non-lawgeeks, this won't seem important. But trust me, this is huge.

I am very proud to report today that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (THE "IP" court in the US) has upheld a free (ok, they call them "open source") copyright license, explicitly pointing to the work of Creative Commons and others. (The specific license at issue was the Artistic License.) This is a very important victory, and I am very very happy that the Stanford Center for Internet and Society played a key role in securing it. Congratulations especially to Chris Ridder and Anthony Falzone at the Center.

In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you're simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses. Put precisely, whether or not they are also contracts, they are copyright licenses which expire if you fail to abide by the terms of the license.

Important clarity and certainty by a critically important US Court.

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Here's a talk I gave at the iCommons Summit in Sapporo Japan on July 30, 2008. Nothing new to readers here, but reframed a bit for the context.

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Readers of these pages will have been burdened with version after version of my talks about corruption and the Change Congress movement. This Wednesday, in San Jose, I'll give a final 20+ minute spin on this, and then release the source material at Change-Congress.org for others to take and build upon.

The live event will be at the Commonwealth Club, San Jose. Here's the link for information.

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This is (I expect) the last book I'll write in this field. Dedicated to Lyman Ray Patterson and Jack Valenti, it pushes three ideas -- (1) that this war on our kids has got to stop, (2) that we need to celebrate (and support) the rebirth of a remix culture, and (3) that a new form of business (what I call the "hybrid") will flourish as we better enable this remix creativity.

I wrote this book last year. Many of the themes were described in 18 minutes in my TED talk. I am very eager to have it out.

You can get notified when it is out on Amazon.

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Just returning from the iCommons Summit in Sapporo, Japan. The Free Beer project made a showing, with a locally brewed version. But this ad caught my eye: "Free Beer" for "500 yen."

We're now at the stage where (at least some) the RMS conception of "free" is clear enough so that even "free beer" is "free as in free speech" such that a price running with the free beer seems (again, to a select set no doubt) perfectly natural.

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I posted the last post thanking Theo Armour for his html version of A Declaration for Independence just before getting on the plane in Tokyo. When I arrived back in the states, I received two revisions of his revision.

The first, by Ben Kerney, corrects some character encoding problems, and places the text is a clearer outline frame.

The second, by Matthew Levine, also corrects the character encoding problem, and very nicely fits the typography of the pdf version.

Both version also cleaned up a problem with the notes. But upon my return, I found another version from Theo Armour fixing the problem with the notes. (I've replaced the original version in the original post with this version as well).

Ok, so first, thank you to all for the help. But now let's move the revisions to the wiki. I have used a simple html2wiki conversion tool to create a draft on wiki.lessig.org. The wiki's spam filter choked on the notes, so the first major fix would be a fix for the notes. But then I'm eager to see how the substance develops.

The link on the wiki is wiki.lessig.org/Declaration4Independence.

Meanwhile, I'll probably build a v2.0 of this Declaration, building on the ideas of the wiki and other ideas I've collection. But for now, thank you again to everyone who helped seed this for the web.

Update: Here also is a LaTeX version. (Thanks, Valentin!)

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