Lessig

Just back from the launch of Creative Commons, Chile, which was in many ways a surprisingly moving few days.

Senator Fernando Flores was the first surprise. Flores was one of the youngest members of the Allende government. He was with Allende on Chile's September 11th (1973), when Pinochet executed his (American supported) coup. Flores has since had an extraordinary career -- prison, exiled to America, time as a scholar studying philosophy and computer science, fantastically successful career in business, exploiting the insights he drew from academics, and now as a Senator (and one time candidate for President). He's well published and written well about.

I rehearse his career not to compete with Wikipedia, but to set up what was to me most significant about what he said: As he explained to the 400 or so IP-activists assembled at the conference, "Any solution will include America."

"America." I admire deeply those who surprise in their perspective. This was a surprise. One might think it very easy for one who had suffered in part because of America never to link "solution" and "America" again. Flores, however, is a wise and careful thinker. In the days after this talk, I got to hear him describe in some depth a conception of progress that depended upon just such wisdom. The right answer in these struggles will include America. It will embrace what is called "IP." And it was clear to him, if more could acknowledge both, we would make more progress more quickly.

Flores was particularly concerned about how our "movement" would develop. He rightly fears its being captured by any extreme position. Though our allies include the extremes (remember this video from the launch of CC) (and as it is my job to disagree with Mr. Valenti: No, it was not my idea, nor is it my "compact," but otherwise, exactly right), it is critical that we develop this platform in a way that can include the widest range of creators. All of us have lives independent of CC; some of those lives push political views that would scare others within CC. But it is important that we distinguish these roles, not as a compromise on what is most important, but as a way to emphasize the important fact that those who disagree fundamentally can at least agree about CC.

Flores was particularly concerned that the leaders of CC within Chile might not share this view. And if his fears proved correct, that would have made things very difficult. It was therefore with some concern that I attended the launch of CC in Santiago. But quickly, my concern melted, as the organizers framed the CC launch in terms I'm sure the Senator would have endorsed.

There were of course moments when strong views had the floor. That, I thought, was important to remind everyone that there were important issues at stake. But those views were balanced with an amazing mix of artists -- musicians, dancers, film, and DJ -- as well as leaders from museums and the academy -- all of whom seemed to recognize well the importance of building understanding across a wide range of interests.

This was confirmed at a meeting after the launch. The core group - who had obviously devoted an immense amount of effort in launching CC, and more importantly, in spreading the code and practices they developed to others within Latin America - asked about our direction. I showed them the Barlow-Valenti video. They immediately asked for a copy to help them. they said, explain to others just how they conceived of their own work. The key for them, to borrow a phrase, was rough consensus and running code: consensus on how to proceed, running legal and technical code, to help others build the infrastructure necessary to support a wide range of free culture related projects, of which CC was just one part. And though Senator Flores could not attend this meeting, I trust he would have been reassured by both the commitment of everyone at the table, and the ideal: to get things done.

We at CC launched a small idea; these people have made it something very big. And as is rarely the case, they have launched its with appropriate humility, and a commitment to making it work well, and soon. Chile has become a new favorite.

Senator Fiorello Cortiana reports that the Patent Directive in the EU Parliament has been defeated -- 650 to 14.

There's a cool new documentary brewing about the free software, free culture movement. I don't like to point to media with me in it, and this does, but I am very funny looking in it, and there is a fantastically moving set of quotes by RMS. Check it out here.

Great interview with Negativland's Don Joyce and Mark Hosler. Favorite line: "Copyright law does not distinguish between sampling and counterfeiting. That's just stupid." (Thanks, Fernando!) (No, not that Fernando!).

Old news: The Economist has again repeated its proposal that copyright terms be restored to the original Statute of Anne term: 14 + 14. Way too radical (but on the right track!) (Thanks, Matthias!)

Bill Patry has a very depressing account about a "a horrific DMCA et al. suit filed against the Internet Archive."

This is an extraordinary transcript of the latest White House Press conference re the Rove story. Is this as unusual as it seems? 41 questions about one issue in 35 minutes.

The BBC is being attacked by UK record companies for giving away public domain recordings of Beethoven. According to the record companies, such offers are "unfair competition." (Thanks, Wallace). Corrected -- sorry for the confusion.

From the PBS website:

Beginning Sept. 6, PBS will make available - exclusively over the Internet - broadcast television's first entirely downloadable series, featuring PBS technology columnist and industry insider Robert X. Cringely's interviews with personalities from the ever-changing world of technology.

"This ground-breaking series will be distributed under a Creative Commons license, so if viewers like what they see, they can redistribute the shows or even edit their own non-commercial version," Cindy Johanson, Senior Vice President, PBS Interactive Learning, said.

From Victor Stone, the amazingly talented musician/coder who is building ccMixter.org:

About 36 hours after the London bombing ASHWAN and Curious uploaded a rap in reaction specifically to the bombing. Almost immediately they were asked to upload the a cappellas. A few days later the remixes are starting to come in...

http://ccmixter.org/file/ASHWAN/40

The referendum that I described earlier has passed. (Thanks, Mike!)

Here's a site with music by Anthony Raijekov, a fantastic Bulgarian musician, licensed under the ShareMusic (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives) CC-license. This is part of the Bulgarian Open-Content.Net project.

Here's a site with music by Anthony Raijekov, a fantastic Bulgarian musician, licensed under the ShareMusic (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives) CC-license. This is part of the Bulgarian Open-Content.Net project.

An Australian Court finding liability for linking to copyright-infringing mp3s.

This is an extremely depressing story about the costs of funding drug research the way we currently do. For more info see the author's website.

So as I've mentioned before, the one promise I keep to my family is a month away, sans Internet, each year since my kid was born. This is year two. The month (or so) begins today. But I've lined up an incredible group to blog in my absence.

This weeks is Cass Sunstein. Cass is certainly the most influential law professor of our time (the only rival is Judge Posner, but he's currently a judge (as you might have guessed)). In 2001, Cass published Republic.com, a brilliant if dark story about the costs of digital culture. Cass is in the first stages of a new book with the other side of the story -- the good in digital community. I thought he could see something of that from the mix of sorts who live here.

Then beginning July 25, the kids from freeculture.org will blog for a week about the Free Culture Movement, and what students can do to advance it. As I've explained again and again, this is a movement begun far from my influence. But I am a strong supporter, and am honored they would spend some time here (during summer vacation, no less!).

Then for two weeks, beginning August 1, the extraordinary Jimbo Wales, founder of Wikipedia will have two weeks on this page. (He's staying in my house with his family while I'm gone. You've heard about the high rents in San Francisco.) Jimbo has a project to figure out what things should be "free." I suggested this might be a great place to explore that.

Finally, for the surprising close, beginning August 15, Hilary Rosen, former Chief Executive of the RIAA will visit this page. She has of course been a visitor in a different sense from the beginning of this page. I'm honored that she would spend sometime understanding and explaining here.

I'm sorry to be gone for such a long period of time. But with this lineup in my stead, you shouldn't be. Thanks to these guests. Please be decent, however direct. And see you on the other side of a month repairing the bonds that distance has created.

This is from Cass Sunstein; I'm most grateful to Larry for inviting me to post on his blog for a bit. His kind invitation is a result of a naive and ignorant inquiry I sent him in the recent past, about information aggregation and its possible limits.

Background: A few years ago, a book of mine, Republic.com, emphasized the risks associated with echo chambers and self-insulation. I'm doing a new book, still inchoate, that continues to explore those risks, but that also stresses the excitingly general possibility that the Internet can allow widely dispersed "bits" of human information to be properly aggregated -- as, for example, through open source software, wikis, prediction markets, and even blogging.

All this is pretty abstract, so let me try to focus it. One of the greatest arguments of the twentieth century is Hayek's about the price system. In particular, Hayek claimed that any "price" is capturing the information and tastes of many people, in a way that will outperform the judgments of even the best experts. Hence prices do a lot better than any central planners. Here's a puzzle: How close is the analogy between the price system on the one hand and wikis, open source software, and even the blogosphere on the other? Where does the analogy break down? When, in particular, will wikis and the blogosphere fail as mechanisms for aggregating dispersed information? I'll venture some thoughts before long, but for the moment I'd just like to pose the question. I know that there's a lot of information out there about all this; any help would be appreciated.

(originally posted 7/16/05)

Here at the University of Chicago, we have something called the Chicago Judges Project, by which we tabulate and analyze thousands of votes of judges on federal courts of appeals. One of our key findings thus far is this: In many controversial areas (eg, affirmative action, campaign finance, sex discrimination, disability discrimination, environmental regulation, and more), Republican appointees show especially conservative voting patterns when they're sitting on 3-judge panels that consist only of Republican appointees. So too for Democratic appointees: They're far more liberal, in their voting patterns, when sitting with two fellow Democratic appointees, than when sitting on a panel with at least one Republican appointee. In other words, Republican appointees look more conservative when they sit only with fellow Republican appointees, and Democratic appointees look more liberal when they sit only with fellow Democratic appointees.

This is real-world evidence, we think, of group polarization: the process by which like-minded people, engaged in deliberation with one another, typically end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk. (So, for example, French people who distrust the US distrust the US even more after talking with one another.) Group polarization reflects a form of information aggregation, or at least opinion aggregation, that sometimes leads in unfortunate directions. It's a big contrast to the price system, Wikipedia, and open source software.

Here's a related phenomenon: hidden profiles. In a deliberating group, shared information (information held by many or most) usually has a much bigger effect than unshared information (information held by a few or just one). The result is that groups have "hidden profiles," in the form of information that doesn't get out, or that has less impact than it deserves. Some big mistakes by private and public organizations (including faculties!) are a result of hidden profiles.

Here again, the price system, Wikipedia, and open source software do a lot better. (Of course there are important differences among the three, as the terrific comments so far suggest, and on which more soon.) All this raises many puzzles. Here's one: Are there ways to incorporate what we've been learning, from those three, so as to make group deliberation go better?

(originally posted 7/17/05)

As recently reported, Republican-appointed court of appeals judges get significantly more conservative, and Democratic-appointed court of appeals judges get significantly more liberal, when they are sitting with judges appointed by a president of the same political party. But there are two areas where this does NOT happen -- where Republican appointees differ from Democratic appointees, but where judges' voting patterns are unaffected by the composition of the panel. Any guesses?

Affirmative action? No. Environmental protection? No. Gay rights? No. Campaign finance or commercial advertising or obscenity? No. Race and sex discrimination? No. The two areas are: Abortion and capital punishment. In those areas, Republican appointees differ a lot from Democratic appointees, but the rest of the panel doesn't much matter.

Hayek's big claim about the price system was that it aggregates widely dispersed information and tastes. For this reason, he said that it was a "marvel." We've been discussing other ways of aggregating information, and it might be useful to start with Wikipedia, if only because Jimbo Wales refers to Hayek in his comments.

Wikipedia does aggregate dispersed information -- amazingly so. In a general way, it's definitely a Hayekian process. But there are at least two differences between Wikipedia and the price system. First, Wikipedia doesn't rest on economic incentives. People aren't participating because they're getting a commodity or money. There are no trades. Second, Wikipedia generally works by a "last in time" rule. The last editor. and hence a single person, can do a lot. But in the price system, the last purchaser usually can't have a huge effect. (Even if you buy 10,000 copies of each of Larry's books, you won't affect the price.) The upshot is that Wikipedia is different from the price system; it aggregates dispersed information in a distinctive and less reliable way.

Two qualifications. 1) Wikipedia nonetheless works, at least for the most part. 2) The price system doesn't always work, in the sense that bad information, sometimes spreading like wildfire, can produce inflated and deflated prices. (So Hayek was too optimistic, as behavioral economists have shown.)

What is this discussion missing?

In case anyone hasn't heard by now: The President plans to announce his nominee to the Supreme Court tonight.

An initial thanks for the many excellent comments and emails, which I'm trying to absorb. We've been discussing several methods for aggregating views: markets a la Hayek, group deliberation, and wikis (with a brief mention of open source software). One emphasis has been on problems with group deliberation, because like-minded people usually end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before.

In his fun and illuminating book, The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki emphasizes another method of aggregating opinions: ask a lot of people and take the average answer. In many cases, this method seems to work magically well. If you put a bunch of jelly beans in a jar, and ask 200 people how many beans are in the jar, the average answer is likely to be eerily good. Often the average answer of a large group is right on the mark.

Surowiecki doesn't explain why this happens, but the answer lies in the Condorcet Jury Theorem. If you have a group of people, and if each person is more than 50% likely to be right, the likelihood that the average answer will be right approaches 100% as the size of the group increases. (The math here is so simple that even we lawyers can almost understand it. For nonbinary choices with plurality voting, the math isn't so simple, and this lawyer can't even almost understand it, but there's a result that explains why Condorcet's basic insight applies there too.) Condorcet's result has implications for many practices; it hasn't been adequately exploited by people in business, law, and politics.

Here's a problem, though. If group members are less than 50% likely to be right, the likelihood that the average will be right approaches ZERO as the size of the group increases. (I asked members of the faculty at the University of Chicago Law School to estimate the weight of the horse who won the Kentucky Derby, the number of lines in Antigone, and the number of Supreme Court invalidations of state and federal law. The group average did really well with the first question, pretty badly with the second, and horrendously with the third!) Condorcet was well aware of this point, and hence he emphasized that we can't rely on the wisdom of group averages when most group members are likely to be biased or wrong.

Are group averages likely to be worse than what emerges from group deliberation? The answer is mixed. Sometimes deliberation does help to correct errors (especially when people are considering a "eureka" problem, where the answer is clearly right once identified). But sometimes deliberating groups do little better, and sometimes even worse, than predeliberation averages.

Are markets likely to do better than group averages? The simplest answer is yes, because participants have strong incentives to be right, and won't participate unless they think they have something to gain.

In an extremely short time, everyone seems to have concluded that Judge Edith Brown Clement will be nominated to the Supreme Court. This is clearly an informational cascade, in which almost everyone is responding to the statements of others, who are responding in turn to the statements of others, etc. (Compare the frenzy over the supposedly definite resignation of Chief Justice Rehnquist -- also an informational cascade, including many people in high positions in the media and government.) A tentative hunch, though, is that everyone is right on this one.

If the President does choose Judge Clement, the most obvious point is that he's chosen someone without much of a record. Other candidates include, for example, Michael McConnell, Michael Luttig, Frank Easterbrook, Mary Ann Glendon, and Edith Jones, all of whose views are much easier to find. The choice of someone without much of a paper trail -- if that's what we're going to see -- would be extremely interesting.

Odd: Some people have objected to my little post about Judge Clement, but apparently its substance was right. People were indeed participating in an informational cascade. Unfortunately, I ended up joining that cascade (tentatively). The confident view that the President had chosen Judge Clement, like the confident view that the Chief Justice was about to retire, was clearly a process in which many people were confidently relying on unreliable people, to the point where the number of (confident) people was misleadingly high. That's a (bad) cascade. With respect to the confirmation hearings, I predict we'll see at least one other bad cascade in the next two months. Let's watch for it.

Prediction markets, springing up at a rapid rate, provide another way of aggregating private information. Far more Hayekian than simply polling people, these markets have had some terrific success in predicting the outcomes of presidential elections (see the Iowa Electronic Markets) and also in predicting the Oscars and general box office results (see the Hollywood Stock Exchange). For Hayek's reasons, it's easy to see why prediction markets might work well. They aggregate private judgments, and dispersed bits of information, in a way that is backed by economic incentives. They have big advantages over the Condorcet method (poll and average) and what we might call the Habermasian method (deliberate and exchange reasons).

Here's the but: The prediction markets apparently did very badly with the Supreme Court nomination. Roberts was way behind for a long time on tradesports.com, and during the Clement cascade, Clement started to dominate everyone else. (Also Rehnquist was strongly predicted to resign; investors got that one wrong too.) Can we develop a general account of when prediction markets will work well, and when they won't? (And if so, should we eventually test that account in a prediction market?)

In his treatment of democracy, Jurgen Habermas emphasizes the importance and internal morality of deliberation. He thinks that under ideal conditions, "the forceless force of the better argument" will prevail. His account of deliberative democracy lies at the heart of his treatment of constitutional theory. Of course democracy can be seen as a mechanism for aggregating diverse views about both facts and values; and Habermas offers a distinctive account of democracy.

But here's a serious problem. Even under ideal conditions, the better argument may not prevail. Careful experiments have shown that groups often amplify, and do not merely propagate, individual errors. Group polarization, as discussed previously, brings about extremism, even if extremism is unjustified. Information held by a few people, or just by one, often plays little or no role in a group's ultimate decision. Informational cascades can lead deliberation in unfortunate directions. And because people care about their reputations, they may silence themselves even if they know something that is both important and true.

True, Habermas' conditions include a principle of equality and a ban on strategic behavior. But even if these conditions are fulfilled, every one of these problems may infect deliberation.

Hayek, of course, stressed the qualities of the price system, which in his view serves as an excellent method of aggregating dispersed information. If we underline Hayek's emphasis on economic incentives, we have the core of a challenge to Habermas: In deliberation, those incentives might well be absent, and hence people sometimes fail to say what they know.

We've also seen some reasons why the price system might fall victim to the same problems that beset deliberation. (Cf. the Clement cascade, affecting prediction markets.) And it wouldn't be too hard to sketch a Habermasian critique of Hayek. But at least it can be said that group deliberation often goes badly wrong, and for identifiable reasons, even under ideal conditions.

Here's a passage from the first entry on Judge Richard Posner's blog (which he runs with Gary Becker): "Blogging is . . . a fresh and striking exemplification of Friedrich Hayek's thesis that knowledge is widely distributed among people and that the challenge to society is to create mechanisms for pooling that knowledge. The powerful mechanism that was the focus of Hayek's work, as of economists generally, is the price system (the market). The newest mechanism is the 'blogosphere.' There are 4 million blogs. The internet enables the instantaneous pooling (and hence correction, refinement, and amplification) of the ideas and opinions, facts and images, reportage and scholarship, generated by bloggers."

I think that Posner is wrong to see the blogosphere as a Hayekian mechanism akin to the price system. The blogosphere does not produce prices. It doesn't even produce a giant wiki, aggregating dispersed information. Instead it offers an amazingly diverse range of claims, perspectives, rants, insights, lies, facts, non-facts, sense, and nonsense. In his recent book, Blog, Hugh Hewitt celebrates the power of blogs to hold powerful actors, including the mass media, to account. He's right to celebrate that power. And of course it's true that the blogosphere makes it more likely that dispersed knowledge will get out. But the analogy to the price system is badly strained.

My little book, Republic.com, was written before blogs had anything like the prominence they now have. But it would be easy to apply the argument there to the blogosphere -- to suggest that too much of the time, like-minded people are speaking (or at least listening) mostly to one another, ensuring that they end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk. I believe that this view would be much too pessimistic (see the diverse comments on this blog, for example, or at The Volokh Conspiracy), but the question is really an empirical one on which we don't yet have a lot of data.

The blogosphere is exposing people to lots of new topics, perspectives, and information. But Posner's invocation of Hayek is a big stretch.

An empirical note on group polarization and outrage: A few years ago I was involved in a series of experiments (with Daniel Kahneman and David Schkade), trying to figure out why juries (and others) get outraged, and why they end up imposing high or low punitive damage awards.

Testing about 1000 jury-eligible people, we found that on a bounded scale (1-6 or 1-8, where 1 means not at all outrageous, or no punishment, and 6 or 8 means extremely outrageous, or severe punishment), Americans agree on the appropriate level of outrage and punishment. At least in personal injuries cases, a "5" is thought, by most people, to be a "5." Whites agree with African-Americans, old people with young people, poor with rich, well-educated with not well-educated.

The dollar metric produces a lot more variety. People don't agree on whether a "5" should be punished with a $1,000,000 award, or a %5,000,000 award, or a $50,000 award. (The study can be found in the Yale Law Journal circa 1998 and also in Cass R. Sunstein et al., Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide, circa 2002.)

But this study didn't involve deliberating juries. With deliberation, we found some surprises. (a) If the median juror started low on the bounded scale, at say 2, the jury ended up at 1 -- a leniency shift. (b) If the median juror started high on the bounded scale, say at 6, the jury ended up at 7 -- a severity shift. (c) The jury's dollar awards were much higher than the median juror's dollar awards -- a BIG severity shift for dollars. In 27% of cases, the jury's award was as high as, or even higher than, that of the highest individual juror's awards before jurors started to talk! (This study can be found in the Columbia Law Review circa 2000 and also in Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide.)

A general lesson is this: If people are outraged, and are surrounded by other people who are outraged too, they end up getting more outraged still. There's a severity shift, often a big one. I speculate that the point bears on political polarization in general -- and that it has implications for the blogosphere too.

On information aggregation, I haven't yet said anything about open source software (though some comments refer to it). But to an outsider, OSS does exceptionally well in incorporating the ideas of numerous people. It's analogous to the most optimistic understanding of Wikipedia (yes?). Here are the ridiculously ignorant outsiders' queries, with apologies for the ignorance: Does OSS do as well as it seems in aggregating dispersed information (and dispersed creativity)? If so, why? If not, why not? It's hard to have an adequate understanding of how information aggregation can go well, or badly, without having some answers. (I've read and learned a ton from Eric Raymond, Larry L., and several others, but the questions are not entirely answered.)

First things first: A grateful thanks for the incredibly helpful comments on my ignorant queries about OSS. (More comments on those queries are more than welcome.) The comments prompt the following thought. For OSS, there's a lot of dispersed knowledge and also creativity, and that's a big reason for the success. Something similar is true of Wikipedia (though as some people have suggested, the aggregation process is less reliable there). With ordinary product markets, there's also a lot of dispersed knowledge, both about product performance and about individual tastes. If a watch doesn't keep time very well, the market will respond, at least in the aggregate. If most people like the looks of a new car, the market will respond too.

Here we have a clue about why prediction markets sometimes fail, as in the cases of the Rehnquist resignation and the Roberts nomination. There just isn't a lot of dispersed information out there about what the Chief Justice is likely to do or about the President's particular choice. It follows that we shouldn't think (as many do) that prediction markets will be able to foresee terrorist attacks. Investors, taken as a whole, probably lack the information that would make for judgments that improve on the conventional wisdom. If this is right, then prediction markets are unlikely to do well in foreseeing a range of international events.

I have a feeling that this is just a rough cut at the question -- and some of the comments to an earlier post might do better -- but maybe we're making some progress.

There's another form of information aggregation that we haven't discussed: traditionalism. Conservatives who like traditions often build on the work of Edmund Burke, who emphasized that each of us has a small stock of wisdom, and that traditions embody the wisdom of the many. In this way, there's a link between Burke on the one hand and Condorcet on the other -- and a less direct link between Burke and Hayek. Here's a passage from Burke's essay on the French Revolution:

"The science of government being therefore so practical in itself, and intended for such practical purposes, a matter which requires experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be, it is with infinite caution than any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree, for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again, without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes. . . . We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them."

Burke's claims have a lot of power; the problem is that some traditions may be a result of a cascade or group polarization (or worse).

In the meantime I'm wondering whether I'll have the courage to say something about the Bob Dylan concert I recently attended.

Here's my little Bob Dylan story: I took my 15 year old daughter to a Dylan concert a short while ago, and it was wonderful throughout, but the best part was the encore, when he sang Like A Rolling Stone. In the original version, it's an angry, mean, sneering, contemptuous, and hateful song (great too, of course). Dylan himself described the song with the words "hate" and "revenge." Thus the chorus:

How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

In the concert the other night, the song had no hate, and there was no sense of revenge. As it was performed, it was happy, joyful, exuberant, inclusive -- the chorus above all. The audience got it, almost immediately, and so the song turned out to be a celebration -- more or less, a celebration of freedom and human equality. In short, the performance turned the song inside out.

Thanks much to Larry for inviting me to post, and thanks much to you all for the terrific comments and the helpful and generous emails. I've learned a lot.

Hey folks, this is Nelson Pavlosky, co-founder and official figurehead/scapegoat of FreeCulture.org. I'd like to thank Larry for inviting myself and my colleagues to post on his blog; it's an honor to share a stage with amazing people like Cass Sunstein and Jimbo Wales!

Everyone at FreeCulture.org (FC.o) wanted to be a guest blogger for Larry, of course. While we managed to select five of our best bloggers to represent the organization, this is still the largest number of people who have blogged for Lessig at once. Therefore, we've decided to stick to several common themes, in order to provide some continuity.

As I explained in a recent interview, FreeCulture.org was created to fill several gaps in the free culture movement, and we are unique in three ways:
(1) We are a student/youth organization, in a field where the youth have been conspicuous by their absence.
(2) We have a strong local, physical presence, while remaining distributed over a large geographical area. We have local chapters popping up at campuses across the United States, and soon around the world.
(3) We are a big tent organization, uniting many demographics and interest groups into a coherent movement.

These are all aspects in which the free culture movement has been deficient in the past, and I would like to take this week to explore how we can address these shortcomings in the future. How can we get the youth involved? How can we take free culture off the internet and into the streets? How can we take free culture mainstream, and make the movement relevant to people who may not be computer geeks or copyright nerds? Together, I trust that we can find some answers to these questions.

Hey, I'm Sid Srivastava, a rising senior at Columbia University, currently in the process of setting up a FreeCulture.org chapter at my school. I look forward to good discussion about the free culture movement in campus settings and other educational environments.

One of the challenges of spreading free culture, at least among college students, is convincing them they can still participate in the movement even if they aren't artists, hackers, or copyright nerds. I've talked to a number of students who seem interested in the ideals of free culture but, for whatever reason, aren't compelled enough to get involved directly.

So how do you encourage participation without appearing too forceful? One way of addressing this issue is to incorporate free culture into some of the existing extracurricular activities and volunteer efforts on campus -- essentially raising awareness by appealing to individual interests. At my school (and across most college campuses) there is an active interest in volunteerism and a general willingness to help others, both of which could be harnessed for free culture-related activities.

For example, a group that gives health presentations could distribute its packets and presentation materials under Creative Commons licenses, providing health educators elsewhere with new content and ideas. Or, perhaps, students interested in helping the blind and disabled could make recordings of Project Gutenberg texts and release those recordings, gratis, into the community. With a little bit of creativity and ingenuity, a college activity can easily include at least some element of free culture.

Of course, it's also important for the people involved in these types of projects to realize why the free culture tie-in is relevant. In the case of the first example, open access to curricula will likely encourage the formation of other health education programs, a necessity in places like New York City, where there are only 196 health educators for 1.1 million students. And with the public domain texts provided by Project Gutenberg, there are no sticky legal ramifications or copyright issues that could get in the way of mass-producing spoken-text CDs for the people who could use them the most. The free culture movement may have been born out of copyright considerations, but its implications extend well into the domain of the socially conscious.

Given that this meshing of worlds offers so much potential, what are some other projects and ideas that connect free culture with student interests? Besides social activism, what areas involving students could benefit from free culture ideals?

A few months ago, we were considering organizing candlelight vigils on the night before the Grokster oral arguments at the Supreme Court, "vigils for innovation." We decided against it, however, because many of our members felt that it would be too melodramatic. Usually candlelight vigils are held when people die, or on the eve of a war when many people are expected to die, and it's unlikely that anyone will die as a direct result of the Grokster decision, although technological innovation may suffer.

This leads to an interesting question: when we speak of taking the free culture movement off the internet and into the streets, how can we avoid looking silly? There are certainly aspects of free culture where lives are at stake: for instance, millions of people suffer and die in the third world because we're too stupid to use generic drugs to help them, instead of sending inadequate quantities of expensive licensed drugs. But what do we do when lives do not hang in the balance? Will people write us off as nutjobs for protesting in favor of iPods? Would they be right to do so? It seems harder to go over the edge when doing online activism, especially since internet communities can be threatened or destroyed by copyright and free speech issues, so it makes sense to carry on activism in those threatened communities. But in the physical world, our physical bodies are generally not at stake. Only when our copyright laws go completely over the edge and people get thrown in jail do protests seem justified. But do we want to wait until things get that bad? Isn't some pre-emptive protesting in order?

How can we show that these issues are important to us, and take action in "meatspace," without people thinking that we are overreacting?

Howdy there: I'm Gavin Baker, a rising sophomore at the University of Florida and co-founder of the Free Culture group there. I hope this week will give Larry's readers a chance to learn more about us, and prompt some valuable discussion.

I'm writing from an Internet café in Montréal, Québec, where I'm travelling and taking French at l'Université du Québec à Montréal. Besides the observations that naturally arise from contact with a foreign country and culture, I've also had the chance to meet some of Canada's leaders in the free culture movement, about which I've written previously on the Free Culture blog ("Dispatch from the True North, Strong and Free", "Vive la Culture Libre").

FreeCulture.org calls itself "an international student movement," but the claim is a bit tenuous: All our campus groups are based in the U.S., the organization is registered with a U.S. address, and most of our volunteers are in the U.S. This is not to minimize the role people outside the U.S. have played in building FC.o, nor our friends overseas, some of whom have said they'd like to plant the group in their countries -- but we're heavily American, and rather U.S.-centric.

FC.o has a long way to go in terms of the resources we can offer new start-ups, and even further when there's a national, cultural, or language barrier to overcome. Canada, though, makes an appealing prospect for the second national Free Culture group, due to the long-standing ties between the two countries. When I return to the States, I'll be taking some time to reach out to students in Canada interested in our work.

The question remains, however: What do we do when we get there? For instance, how should the presence of international groups affect our decision-making process? Should Canadians have a "vote," so to speak, when determining American policy, and vice-versa? Can we divorce national and international affairs, and leave each country to pursue their own interests, while keeping a united front on international policies? Put simply, to what degree should the fates of groups in different countries be tied?

More generally, what does it mean to be "international" in the free culture arena?

What are the differences between the legal and cultural climate in the U.S. and other parts of the world? If individual issues translate differently across borders, how can we phrase an underlying philosophy that makes sense? Where do we look to find students and volunteers who are interested and knowledgeable about the issues? What can we do to lend assistance where it's needed?

I believe that international cooperation is neccesary to address some of the problems in copyright, in particular: I'm no expert, but I get the impression that many of its uglier facets are set in stone via international treaties (e.g. WIPO) or come as pre-requisites for foreign aid. But much of free culture, per se, is distinctly national, regional, or local -- so a "flexible federalism" with a coherent but open-ended philsophy is neccesary. Or am I wrong?

What do we need to know to operate across borders and in the international sphere? What structures do we need to do so? What differences should we expect? And how do we plant new local presences in unfamiliar soil?

One of the criticisms of the free culture movement in general has been that there are far too many academics and geeks talking about the potential perils of overreaching control over information, and not nearly enough artists. If the artists really believed that this is a threat to culture, the skeptics say, they would act out.

While I do definitely agree that our organization and the movement as a whole need to engage those who are creating art, music, and other creative works, there are a lot of young people out there who are doing exactly the type of work that embodies an open culture. Take Cory Arcangel, who melds art and technology in his Super Mario clouds hack, or Matt Boch, a video artist who combined films of his childhood with his favorite video game to create an exploratory work. Artists like these are reflecting upon works of the past and using new technologies to build upon them.

So even if there are all these young people doing interesting things, how do we get them to care about free culture? Some artists may prefer to embed a political message in their work instead of participating in outright activism. At the same time, I believe that there is a new generation of creators and artists that do indeed care about these issues. As an organization and a movement, we need to make an effort to reach out to these people, to hear their stories, to exhibit their work, and to bring them in.

As a rising 2L at Harvard Law School, I've taken an interest in the intersection between law, technology, and culture. Along the same lines, Fred Benenson and I will be giving a presentation for Freeculture.org at this year's Defcon in Las Vegas explaining why techies should care about the issues surrounding free culture. Much like we need to attract the artists, we also need to make the case to the geeks that they should care about and take action on these cultural issues. More to follow from Defcon...

I am Andy Scudder, a rising sophomore at the Unversity of Evansville, where I have been working to organize a FreeCulture.org chapter.

One of my friends at school got a shiny, brand-new Nikon D70 as a graduation gift and was, obviously, excited about the creative possibilities that it would provide. She already enjoyed browsing my photos on Flickr, so it was no surprise to me that she soon had an account of her own and started posting a few shots from her new camera.

What I wasn't prepared for was the question she asked me a few days later.

"Can I make it so that people can't print my pictures unless they have my permission?"

I tried to be helpful and tell her that she could keep people from seeing the original-sized images (and therefore only have access to images that wouldn't be a suitable print resolution), but she persisted. To her, this was a legitimate question. Since she has no way of knowing who would view her pictures online and what they do with them, she felt that it would be in her best interest to "protect" her copyright by limiting what people could do with it. As she explained it, "I want people to look at my stuff. But I also want to know who has it. It is part of being an artist; you have to know who has your stuff."

But to me, it was a dangerous question. If an artist wants to prevent someone from printing his or her work from their computer, then what other controls would we have to open our hardware, software, and very lives to if such technology existed and was widespread? This is all very reminiscent of the problems with Adobe's e-book reader and its "permissions" system. The ability of software to arbitrarily determine what rights we should and should not have based on a few bits flipped in a file on the whim of the author or publisher reminds us that, as Lessig wrote:

On the Internet, however, there is no check on silly rules, because on the Internet, increasingly, rules are enforced not by a human but by a machine: Increasingly, the rules of copyright law, as interpreted by the copyright owner, get built into the technology that delivers copyrighted content. And the problem with code regulations is that, unlike law, code has no shame.

My concern from this encounter is not that my friend lost interest in Flickr, but that as an art student fresh out of college, she felt that control of what other people's computers could and could not print was an essential feature of copyright. This is a dangerous idea for technology and the freedoms that it promotes, and if most artists hold the same concerns that my friend expressed, then DRM technologies would not only be common but the expected norm by artists.

How can we change this? It seems inevitable that if if we continue to educate our students about copyright with programs designed by the MPAA which do not reconcile for the changes to the creative landscape that digital technology and the Internet have enabled, then we will quickly lose our digital freedoms. Instead, we need to help artists understand the benefits of the digital world and why locking down their works in this landscape would not only hurt the patrons of their works, but the very creative freedoms that they enjoy.

You could say that I grew up with free culture, or that free culture grew up along with me. Free culture as a coherent movement is young, although you could say that its roots go back to the beginning of print culture, since before we had bloggers we had independent pamphleteers like Thomas Paine. It could go back to the beginning of culture itself, since before we had DJs we had the remixing and appropriation inherent in oral cultures of the past and present. Still, only recently have people been connecting the dots, with the help of the democratizing power of digital technology and the internet. The free culture movement is young (like me), and perhaps that's why I feel that young people like me should have a special affinity for it.

I love public libraries. As a kid, I spent most of my lazy Saturday afternoons inside one of the various branches of our library system, delighted at the idea that, wherever I looked, there would be stories, magazines, or books on virtually any subject to capture my attention. The feel of the library was no less captivating. An ethos of learning and relaxation definitely hung in the air, bringing together people of all ages -- from pre-schoolers to senior citizens -- into the midst of a Renaissance-like mesh of scientific thinking and artistic expression.

At any given moment at a library, there are probably kids oohing and aahing over gross bugs, budding young authors writing the next chapters in their stories, and students collaborating on their research assignments. Quite simply, libraries represent a bastion of culture and knowledge, a source of creative inspiration (for me, and almost undoubtedly, for many others).

The free culture movement fosters a similar sense of learning and sharing and creating, which is probably why I was drawn to it in the first place. On a very fundamental level, the collective body of works created by scientists, artists, and thinkers (who want to share their ideas) deserves a place for public consumption, and the online community seems to be a natural extension of the borrowing-and-creating concept epitomized (in my view) by public libraries.

When I entered college, I was somewhat surprised, and disappointed, to discover that many of the institution's libraries were closed to the general public (for security reasons or otherwise), and that a significant percentage of classroom materials were available only to enrolled students. Granted, students may be paying for the education, but knowledge is, well, knowledge and deserves to be free (an oversimplification, perhaps, but my views nonetheless). Therefore, I was pleased to learn about MIT's OpenCourseWare, a "free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world", or as I like to think about it, an effort combining the openness of a public library with the academic intensity of a university.

Naturally, I started wondering about ways in which students could convince their own universities to embrace initiatives like OpenCourseWare, or at the very least, make small changes that could increase the openness and accessibility of knowledge created by professors and information kept in the libraries. What sort of hurdles need to be overcome for this to happen? Is talking to professors and administrators enough? As a student, what can you do to make classroom content more readily available?

For me, this issue is important for the same reasons I feel thrilled to step into a library and read, learn, and explore to my heart's content. Initiatives that contribute to a truly global repository -- or, more fittingly, library -- of ideas almost always bring about about public good.

If you'll excuse the blatant self-promotion, we'd like to let you know that you can support FreeCulture.org by buying one of our snazzy new t-shirts for only $20 shipped in the US and Canada, or $27 internationally. The front prominently features our logo and name across the chest, while the design on the back reminds us that, as Isaac Newton said, "If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Stop by our "Low-tech" shopping page with your credit card ready to get yours today!

Elizabeth may get a chance to sneak in one last post from Defcon -- if she doesn't get hacked -- but I'll go ahead and wind things down.

Thanks to Larry for having us, and thanks to you readers for coming to hear a bit about us. Your feedback is well appreciated.

Keep in touch: subscribe to our announcements mailing list and swing by our blog from time to time. Feel free to join the discussion as well. Snag one of our T-shirts, and give a listen to Creative Common's birthday gift to us.

We're young and busy: we need all the guidance and help we can get. Please help us decide our priorities, form policies and strategies, do outreach, maintain our Web site and communication channels... basically, there's a lot to do: will you help? Remember Lessig's speech at OSCON 2002: "What have you done about it?" If you think there's something at stake with culture, technology, and media -- if you're looking for a way to get involved -- we have nails that need hammering.

If you can help with the Web site, with research and writing, with creating graphics and other media, or with any of a hundred other tasks, drop us a line at freedom@freeculture.org and let us know.

If you want to start a Free Culture group in your own corner of the world, e-mail us at newgroup@freeculture.org and let us know how we can help.

We hope you've gotten a glimpse of what we're about and how we roll over at FC.o. Thanks for lending us an ear. See you around!