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As tiny compensation for (almost) spending more time on the road than at home each year, when our first child was born, we started the best tradition I've ever known: 1 month, off the grid, somewhere amazing. That begins today. It is a real, and essential, luxury. My apologies if it is a burden.
TotalRecut has today launched a remix contest: "What is Remix Culture?" I'm a judge (as close as I'll ever get to that title, but now twice -- just finished judging the Obama in :30 contest). Cool prizes. Great question. Get busy.
This is something to watch, as its potential to enable real integration is amazing: Apture.
JZ's book is out. It is in the brilliant Yale Series of brilliant (and Creative Commons licensed) books (which includes Yochai's as well). But you can (and will want to) buy it the old fashioned way, too.
This book will redefine the field we call the law of cyberspace. That sounds like a hokey blurb no doubt. But hokeness does not mean it is not true. It is true. The field before this book was us cheerleaders trying to convince a skeptical (academic) world about the importance and value of certain central features of the network. Zittrain gives these features a name -- generativity -- and then shows us an aspect of this generative net that we cheerleaders would rather you not think much about: the extraordinary explosion of malware and the like that the generative net has also generated.
Why does that matter? Why should it change things? Well as Z nicely shows, we're radically underestimating the inevitable damage this malware will produce. Whether a single event, or a coordinated event, whether intentional, or accidental, it is simply a matter of time before a catastrophic network event happens. And when it happens -- think of it as a kind of i9/11 event, but the bad guys are not Al-Qaeda -- will we be prepared for the inevitable iPatriot Act response? Are we better prepared than civil libertarians were when we were hit with the USA Patriot Act? Have we even framed the right debate?
Certainly, we cheerleaders haven't. This book begins it, and will define it for a generation (in Internet time, at least).
After thinking through the 37 helpful comments posted to my post about comment policy, I've decided to start slowly as proposed. That means:
I have adopted a policy of deleting personal attacks on others. That means any comment that is directed against someone other than me, which is uncivil and attacking something other than the substance of what that person has written as a comment on my blog will be removed if (1) a request is made by anyone to a2lessig@pobox.com, and (2) the volunteer I've selected agrees the policy has been violated.
I like some of the other suggestions, including incorporating the slashdot system. As things develop, I may move to something more.
Thanks to all for the help.
Julian Sanchez has a piece in Ars Technica analyzing my recent outing by PFF as a communist. Or socialist. Or quasi-socialist utopianist. Whatever. I'll leave the criticisms of the criticisms of my scholarship to the reader to judge. One perfectly framed point of the piece, though, is something I completely agree with: There is a divide in the libertarian camp about IP extremism. And when, as I'd put it, "libertarians ... 'start to defect' from a strong-IP stance, copyright incumbents [will] be left with only their wholly-owned-subsidiaries as defenders."
Then, I suggest, real progress will be made.
Many have asked me about my Keynote (it is not PowerPoint) presentation style. I honestly don't have much to say about it, as I've not thought it through. But Chris Tunnell, a researcher on the SNO neutrino physics experiment has, and he sent me his thoughts about how and why (and whether) the style works based on his own experience using it for physics presentations. Read about it in the extended entry.
I've given now four versions of the lecture launching Change Congress. You can see them all (and more) at the Change Congress channel at blip.tv [change-congress.blip.tv]. Some have asked for the resources to remix (by which I take it they mean, improve on) the message. I've very happily now made those resources available here.
On that page you'll find links to two directories, one related to the April 4 Harvard speech, and the other related to the April 11 UCSB speech. Each folder has a keynote file, a ppt file, an image for each slide, and a zip wrapping up all the images. The page will be fancied up soon enough. Everything is under a CC-BY license. Remix away.
PFF has launched what they promise to be a "series of papers that will critique Free Culture and the Free Culture Movement." Their first is a piece by Tom Sydnor II called "Tragedy and Farce: An Analysis of the Book FREE CULTURE." Calling the book akin to "quasi-socialist utopianism," the 17 page review is certain to be an interesting read. Someone should add this to the Anti-Lessig Reader.
Just after the writer's (and writers') strike ended, Matt Prager (who worked for 15 years in Hollywood as a writer and executive) sent me this fantastic essay about what was really at stake in the strike (guess...). Here's the start:
The WGA strike to date has been more or less characterized as a strike over money; most press reports have dealt with negotiation demands like residuals and up-front compensation on internet streams and downloads, jurisdiction over reality and animation, and other such issues. However, the press reports have missed the central, underlying issue of this strike: copyright. This battle is not “poor laborer” versus “greedy company” – everyone in Hollywood is pretty greedy frankly. Rather, in the same way that fiction is the business of Hollywood, so is the entire underpinning of Hollywood built on an enormous fiction. But to understand the fiction, you first need to understand some facts.
Here's the balance.
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