Lessig

Thanks to Larry Lessig for inviting me to blog here this week.  I’ve been blogging on my campaign’s website for a while now, and I really enjoy it.  It’s a chance to exchange about ideas instead of soundbites and speeches.

The Internet is the most extraordinary technological innovation in decades.  In the small towns where I grew up, it has become an economic engine.  In the after-school center my wife and I started, it’s an educational tool.  And on this blog and countless like it, the Internet is changing our democracy.

Thanks for all the great responses to my last post.  Yesterday was a busy day because of the Rock the Vote debate.  I was ready to talk about technology issues, but the questioners had other things on their minds.  As happens almost everywhere I go, I got a question about jobs.  And that got me thinking about the many connections between technology and jobs.  Everyone knows how the tech boom of the late nineties created wealth for Americans.  But today, we're seeing a very different trend: high-tech jobs moving overseas to countries like India.  In every state where I campaign, I meet people who feel like they did everything they were supposed to do--like staying in school and getting high-level skills--and yet they are still losing work as their jobs leave America. 

Thanks again for all the comments.  Got some very good ideas, and plan to continue discussing outsourcing of high-tech jobs tomorrow in New Hampshire

Several people wanted to hear more about intellectual property, so I thought I would focus on that today.   The first priority of intellectual property law is to foster innovation and progress for our society.  To achieve that goal, the law must protect the rights of inventors.  And there must be a fair balance between the scope of those rights and the public interest.

I apologize to Senator Edwards for interrupting his blog -- especially now that he is on to intellectual property and saying something extremely interesting and useful. But apropos of the balance that Senator Edwards is discussing, I learned today that Professor Ray Patterson has died.

Ray Patterson was one of the very first scholars in intellectual property law to identify and raise concern about the dramatic change in the law's reach. His 1968 book, Copyright in Historical Perspective is an amazing work mapping the transformation of copyright in America. Ray was the teacher of a generation of scholars, and though I met him only once, I am proud to count myself as one of his students. It is just profoundly sad that he did not live to see the law reflect the extraordinary work that he did.

Thanks for the good comments on the last post.  I definitely get questions here that I don't usually hear on the campaign trail! 

I'm grateful to Senator Edwards for spending some cycles on my blog. I am particularly grateful given his willingness to say a few things about the sort of things Democrats don't talk about enough -- IP and Free and Open Source Software. As obvious as the issues of balance and choice are to the likes of many who hang around here, I think we should not underestimate just how politically difficult it is to say the obvious. In particular, I read the comment about the importance of a level playing field for software to be a clear rejection of the move pushed by, e.g., Congressman Adam Smith to ban GPL within government research. (Apparently Adam Smith was named by the same guys who named the Patriot Act). To side with, e.g., the Free Software Foundation (which also opposes mandates, but endorses competition) and against Microsoft (which gave Adam Smith his bad idea) is not to side with power against right.

Most candidates seem to think it better to just stay quiet about these issues. They might be right. It might be better, politically. God knows, the Democrats can't upset the content industry. But character takes small steps such as these -- regularly, as part of the routine. And it doesn't suprise me to see such character here.

Thank you again, Senator.

Ok, so NBC produces a show about Private Lynch. She says the story is not true. But nonetheless, NBC runs the show. CBS produces a show about Ronald Reagan. The man who Would Save Reagan from TV and others say it is biased against Reagan. CBS cancels the show.

Apparently it is ok to bend the truth, but only in one way.

Today, the Berklee College of Music has released Berklee Shares, a site offering free music lessons for download. All content is available under a Creative Commons license, including mp3s embedded with CC licenses.

Free lessons for musicians, and a valuable lesson for the rest of us.

Bravo.

I'm sure this happened all the time before, but now we've got a name for it. Dean in New Hampshire.

There's a nice series here.

Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff have written a book, Why Not?, with a bunch of ideas that they want to give away, as a way of teaching innovation. Ideas like "why can't I email a list of numbers I need to call to my cell phone" are there (and here) for the taking. They've also built a website with more free ideas.

I wrote at the end of last month about Mark Cooper's new book, Media Ownership and Democracy in the Digital Information Age, which is available for free download under a Creative Commons license. It's also available from Amazon. Mark was slow to get me the link because he said he didn't want to "compete with free." But free complements nonfree, and if you like what you read, buy it from Amazon.

In an effort to grow the technology around the Semantic Web, Creative Commons launched a series of Technology Challenges. Nathan Yergler has posted a very cool answer to one of those challenges. MozCC is "an extension for Mozilla-based browsers, including Mozilla Firebird, Mozilla and Netscape, which scans pages for RDF, specifically embedded Creative Commons licenses.  When a license is detected, mozCC does two things.  First, it scans for license information pertaining to the current web page and places relevant icons on the status bar.  Second, it enables a button on the toolbar which allows you to explore the parsed licensing metadata." Nathan has also developed a Creative Commons RDF License Validator.

Re IPR is unclear, Mark Liberman writes, but as I agree, the idea is very cool. StoryCorps collects recordings of people telling the story of their life, and then deposits them in the Library of Congress.

A followup to this story about a call to build a comprehensive package of world flags in SVG format: GNOME Desktop News reports the first release of the Sodipodi SVG flag collection. You can see the collection here.

Last month, I posted a link to some free software for Mail.app OS X that Jonathan Nathan is offering under the GPL. This code was designed to allow a user of Mail.app to move a message to a folder with a single keystroke.

Since then, there's been some progress in the Mail.app app, but not as much as one would think. Apple has released Panther, and Aaron has released a script that does the same thing within Panther.

Both Jonathan's and Aaron's nicely move a message to a folder. Aaron's is built to enable the binding of a keystroke to an AppleScript directly. But both have a common weakness: After a message is moved, the system forgets which message it has last selected.

Weird, because, e.g., this very simple script within Microsoft's Entourage does the same thing, but without forgetting the last message selected:


--Open this script in a new Script Editor window.



tell application "Microsoft Entourage"

    set curMsgs to current messages

    repeat with theMsg in curMsgs

        move theMsg to folder " friends" in folder "Archive"

    end repeat

end tell

(Update:: this cool applescript formatting trick is thanks to another Jon Nathan script -- available here)

Note in Entourage, if you save the script with a "\cX" in the script name, then ctrl+X will run the script.

It is surprising, one might think, that Microsoft's mail app operates more robustly with AppleScript than Apple's. As well as a bit frustrating.

The FCC has released more spectrum in the 5 ghz band, and established minimum usage rules for that free spectrum. The decision is applauded from Microsoft to the New America Foundation and Media Access Project.

And applauded it should be. There is much more to be done (as the NAF and MAP release argues), and a danger that this new free spectrum will lead many to think enough has been done. But the FCC should be praised for moving quickly and rightly.

Carl Jacobson of Cakewalk sent this very coolpicture. He tried to explain the freedom that could be his. Mickey just smiled.

Julian Dibbell and I taught a class last term about the law in virtual worlds. The part that was most surprising to me was that none of the commercial ventures gave users rights over the content they created -- until now. Second Life by Linden Lab is not only an extraordinarily cool new virtual world. It is also the first commercial virtual world to make it explicit that users own the content they create. As this release describes, a revised TOS "allows subscribers to retain full intellectual property protection for the digital content they create, including characters, clothing, scripts, textures, objects and designs." And, if this wasn't cool enough, Second Life has also "committed to exploring technologies to make it easy for creators to license their content under Creative Commons licenses."

Creative Commons has had an iCommons project for sometime now. I guess now we'll have to begin the vCommons project.

So my brand is supposed to be pessimism, but I'll confess that since young Mr. Willem began to smile, it is becoming very hard for me to stick to brand. And now there is this news about Dave and Mark Pilgrim collaborating about standards. That is indeed wonderful news.

Dave Winer has rightly and nicely called for the presidential candidates to say something clear and strong about the internet and how they would propose to keep it free. And he's right that we don't yet have clear and strong positions from anyone about issues that are important to preserving the internet's freedom. On this blog, Kucinich, Dean and Edwards have all questioned the media consolidation. But only Kucinich and Edwards have tried to wade into the intellectual property debate (and what both have said is useful and good).

That took some courage. Yet to many in the Democratic party, it showed foolishness. I've had literally scores of people write me to tell me not to push Dean or anyone else to speak clearly about issues related to IP (note to readers: fear not, all my demands of candidates for the presidency are ignored) -- "don't do anything to scare away Hollywood."

This always spins me down. I'm just returning from a conference in Italy where a totally establishment collection of leaders from political parties, and business, were describing the progress to spread open and free software throughout Europe -- not to the exclusion of proprietary software, but as an equal competitor -- and describing the importance of balance in IP. It was a meeting totally unimaginable in the US. Meanwhile, back in the US, the leader of the New Democrats (Adam Smith) is promoting legislation to ban the GPL from government research, and the Democratic party is afraid to say anything balanced and sensible about IP related issues.

What made this campaign fun at the start was the thought that finally, a Democrat would wage a campaign where he said what was right and true, as the only way to win the passion of a generation. Yet apparently, cautious and careful have returned. Maybe that's necessary to win a campaign -- I have no clue about that. But if that is so, I am sorry it is necessary.

So I hate spam (and of course I don't mean the product by the Hormel company which has been cool enough to let the world use this word without launching a war against the use of its trademarked name), and I've been pushing bounties as one essential part of any real solution. Congress, the world is slowly coming to see, has no interest in a real solution -- at least after the marketers were finished them. But I am encouraged that Microsoft has launched a bounty campaign against virus makers. That's a much harder tracing to make, though they've offered lots more money than a spam bounty would require.

Meanwhile, this is a great story about a sort of vigilante
action against the most infamous of spammers. Bravo.

The deeper I get into these wars to free culture, the more I come to wonder about what life back in the academy, only, will be like. I got a great taste of that yesterday, at a seminar at NYU run by Professors Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel. These guys are the rockstars of the legal academy (though Nagel is a philosopher first), and this seminar is among the most serious, and most carefully prepared, that I have ever seen. I presented a few chapters from a new book, Free Culture, and was relieved to see I could still take about these issues in a purely academic way. Peter Leigh Northup blogged the event. (Thanks, Peter.)

Reed Hundt, former chairman of the FCC, and force of good in many of the debates that live on these pages, has a great piece about the battle over Voice-over-IP in the FCC.

Donna's got a great piece on Congressman Kucinich's criticism of Diebold abuse of copyright.

Continuing the hope of Dave that policy makers might think sanely about these issues. See the comment at O'Reilly Net.

Andy Orlowski has a wonderfully argued but sad piece about the sale of mp3.com to CNET. As he reports, the archive of music that was mp3.com will be destroyed. As Andy writes,

"Not since the Great Leap Forward has there been such a destruction of the commons. Back then, for political reasons, millions of books were burned. Now, for very sensible commercial reasons that we must not question, millions of MP3s will be lost to the commons. You have precisely seventeen days to grab the good stuff (and, Steb Sly - we hope you have a backup) ... CNET will follow Wal-Mart, Real Inc. and Apple Computer into the DRM business, infecting as many computers as they can with restrictive software controls that close what for a brief period has been an open computer platform. They all hope that this tentative business model, the terms of which are set by the entertainment "industry", will somehow turn them a profit. Or at least give the illusion of doing so, until a better idea comes along.

I've been lamenting the fast slide of mp3.com for sometime now. Now there's nothing more to lament. CNET's got a great domain name. And beyond that, Michael Robertson's vision of a new industry is over.

I've got a piece in Wired about the push to shift ownership of networks back to customers. It build on the work of Alan McAdams and the IEEE to accelerate broadband deployment in the US. For a great collection of papers related to this, see this . The Burlington, VT, story is told here. And the Utopia project in Salt Lake City is another great example of this.

So my wife and I (and Willem!) are returning to Japan next week (Willem is returning in only the strangest sense) for the launch of iCommons Japan. CC-Japan is being sponsored by Glocom, which has done an extraordinary amount to bring CC to life in Japan. Of all the ideas that CC has sparked, iCommons is the most exciting to me, and of all the iCommons partner countries, Japan is the most natural.

If you need to be convinced, you should plan New Year's in Tokyo. Not only is the city amazing beyond belief, but each year there is a comic market held near Tokyo that captures the spirit of Creative Commons if not quite the letter. Each year, the Comic market (Japanese site; English version coming) attracts hundred of thousands to Tokyo to meet and trade dojinshi comics -- which are comics directly derived from commercial work, but often without express permission of the original author. I wrote a piece about this for Red Herring last year. The bottom line: less control, more creativity, more for artists.

The market is from December 28-30. I regret that we won't be there this year (Willem wails about it each time I tell him), but if anyone from here goes, please send pics! (cc-licensed, of course).

Christopher Lydon (who became famous to me when he hosted The Connection (search on Lydon) and who has collected an amazing group of interviews from people blog related) has added Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi to his collection. The interview is excellent, though my favorite Lydon remains the Creative Commons Flash!. Stay tuned for a new Flash!, with more Chris Lydon.

Dave Winer spoke at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society's lunchtime series. The talk will be archived here soon. There was a great turn-out keen to learn from the master, and the master taught well -- mixing genuine and useful insight with an idealism that is too rare around here.

Law students begin life as idealists, and there's an obvious and powerful idealism in the Winer's arguments. I'll point to my favorite parts when the talk is posted. Meanwhile, I was happy to tell him that the Center will be copying his experiment at Harvard next fall, and offering a blog for every entering student in the law school. Turow's One L, or even Alex Wellen's Barman will be nothing in comparison.

In an underreported event, Diebold has apparently asked the court to drop its threats against students who have spread material about the failings of its machines. EFF and the Stanford CIS were representing the Swarthmore students. While we await word whether the court will allow Diebold to walk away from its threats, thanks to the Stanford CIS and EFF (which, unlike CIS, can take donations).

Roy Mark's got a great piece in InternetNews: Spam Bill is a Turkey. The story of why spam fighting (and free culture fighter) congresswoman Zoe Lofgren voted against this totally useless legislation.

CongressDaily (a publication that politicians read on the Hill but which is not available to the rest of us online) has a story about Senator Corzine holding up the pro-spam "anti-spam" bill to insist that the FTC at least study the viability of bounties as part of the solution to spam. Senators have the power to "hold" a bill despite its unanimous approval. Very cool power, that.

The Creative Commons Moving Images Contest deadline looms (Dec 31). Give us 2 minutes explaining our message better, and we'll give you the world. (Ok, just a G5 or Alienware 2001DV) (Take the Mac!).

The contest will be judged by a great collection of great judges (including my favorite actress, Elizabeth Shue). And as I continue my regret about the bad timing of my trip to Tokyo, here's a great idea: mash-up the Comic Market!

It was a great day for Cory. Congratulations.

Groklaw has a page devoted to SCO.

Ok, this is very cool. AISO GrepLaw, Detritus as set up a "Sonny Bono is Dead" site, collecting samples from the works that would have passed into the public domain, but for the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.

Sonny Bono, I am told, was a sweet man and great friend. I'm sure that's true, and his untimely death certainly robbed the world of the very best of this man. It's therefore very sad that the worst of Sonny Bono continues to echo -- this indiscriminate extension of copyrights. Congresswoman Mary Bono had some great ideas about how to make Congresswoman Lofgren's Public Domain Enhancement Act "better," as she put it. Is there a possible Sonny Bono Public Domain Act in the works?