Lessig

I spend a lot of time at Stanford but am not a student there. I would be supremely interested in starting/joining/helping a chapter there. Anyone?
Tim

"I spend a lot of time at Stanford but am not a student there. I would be supremely interested in starting/joining/helping a chapter there. Anyone?"

I would suggest, rather, that "supremely interested" people are not as supreme as they think they are.

'Course their "friendz" will not tell them the truth, that anybody who'd use a phrase "supremely interested" is a pompous jackal.

Point is, find me a movement that's sole goal is to stomp the crap (using anything other than physical violence) outta pompous jackals who are either starting a movement or supporting a movement..

..and I'll join that movement, only.

And I mean seriously stomping the crap outta you jackals and hyenas, not pussy-footin' around.

But I'll bow outta this discussion pretending to be intelligent discourse, because I'm sick and tired of typing human into software built by hucksters for the benefit of hucksters.

Stallmanism rules, you say... Thx...)-;

I'm gonna feed this one and take a wild guess. "supremely interested" probably denotes the level of the posters enthusiasm not unlike "really friggin interested" or "damn interested" and does not try to define said poster as being somehow supreme now, interested later.
I got a funny picture of you when you used the word "pompous jackal" : Small glass of scotch in one hand, pinky jutting straight out. Coughing out some practiced intellectual laugh. "Pompous Jackel". Hehe. You just went off over someones use of an adverb and proceed to use the term "pussy-footin'".
I could be way off.

I am not aware of a chapter of the Free Culture group at the University of Utah. I'm not in a position to start one at this time but I'll definitely join up if it is ever created.

In the meantime, I've made some drawings and artwork at my blog available under a Creative Commons license. You can find them at http://www.wump.info/wumpblog

Scott, since Diebold is "fighting" on several fronts, and "intellectual property" is a very fuzzy term, I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to. I can think of three possible news stories that you might be referring to.

• Some Diebold emails that showed the voting machines aren't truly secure were leaked. These emails were posted on various websites, and Diebold sued claiming copyright infringement. The judge eventually ruled that the emails weren't ever meant for publication, and as such didn't qualify for copyright protection.

  If Diebold had tried some kind of trade secret claim, it may have fared better (then again, I didn't follow this case too closely, so it's possible that Diebold did try a trade secret claim). However, to even bring a trade secret claim, Diebold would have to identify the secrets in the emails that give it an advantage in the marketplace. I'm pretty sure that most of the emails in question talked about poor programming, not trade secrets, so this probably wouldn't have flied.

• The source code for the voting machine software doesn't necessarily have to be released as open source software. However, since the states using the voting machines are the final customers, they are perfectly able to ask to see the code before ponying up the money. On top of that, the states are free to write election laws to require whatever kind of disclosure of source code they feel like.

Diebold could try claiming trade secrets, but that would only keep it from selling its products.

• After the last election, a group of non-profit organizations asked for vote tallies under the federal Freedom of Information Act. Since the request is for something of public record -- vote counts -- and not the source code to the software running the voting machines, Diebold isn't the "creator" and can't claim copyright or trade secret protection. However, if the FOIA doesn't cover vote tallies, the requests may end up failing anyhow. I don't know if the FOIA applies, since I don't work with it on a regular basis. University professors that look at data collected by the federal government could tell you.

Bizarrely enough, we still don't have any chapters on the west coast. This will probably change next semester, but we have 14 chapters currently and none of them are on the west coast. To be honest, when we started the first chapter at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, I was shocked to find that nobody on the west coast had beaten us to it.

Can anyone propose some explanation? Don't college kids on the west coast care about these issues? Hasn't Lessig converted any undergrads on his own campus? You'd think they'd just soak up free culture through osmosis ^_^