Lessig

So the year resumes. Thanks to the guest bloggers -- Cass Sunstein, the Free Culture Movement, Jimmy Wales, and Hilary Rosen. And thanks to all who've written worried about my silence, or asking for my return. I hadn't realized how long it would take to dig out from my time away. I'm almost there.

First Monday has a very interesting piece on the "unacknowledged convergence of open source, open access, and open science."

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics, on TRIPS:

"Intellectual property is important, but the appropriate intellectual-property regime for a developing country is different from that for an advanced industrial country. The TRIP’s scheme failed to recognize this. In fact, intellectual property should never have been included in a trade agreement in the first place, at least partly because its regulation is demonstrably beyond the competency of trade negotiators."

(Thanks, Ren)

So here's a question someone out there should know the answer to.

My family and I were in Spain this summer. On our return back, we flew from Alicante to Frankfurt, through Barcelona. (No, for no good reason.) Our ticket from Alicante to Barcelona was on Iberia, and from Barcelona to Frankfurt on Lufthansa. We had about an hours connection in Barcelona.

When we checked in, Iberia informed us that they would not check the bags through to the Lufthansa flight, and that its only interline agreements were with airlines within the One World Alliance. Thus, in Barcelona, we had to get our bags, recheck them, and then get through security, in less than an hour. Lufthansa was fantastic in helping us. We made the flight by literally 5 minutes.

I guess if I were an airline trying to kill of the amazing competition of new low cost airlines, this would be a good strategy -- make it effectively impossible to interconnect outside your (high cost) network. (E.g., while in Frankfurt, I had to fly to Berlin for a meeting. The cost on Lufthansa for that trip was about 700 EU. The cost on FlyDBA was about 150 EU.) But what is the history of this? It couldn't have been the case that interline agreements were only with alliances, since alliances are new. So when did this practice begin? How broadly practiced is it? And why would competition authorities permit it?

Andy Kessler's got a great piece on the eco-politics of muni wifi.

From the Free Software Foundation, an opportunity to learn more about the GPL:

"The GPL is employed by tens of thousands of software projects aroundthe world, of which the Free Software Foundation's GNU system is a tiny fraction. The GNU system, when combined with Linus Torvalds'Linux---which has evolved into a flexible, highly-portable,industry-leading operating system kernel---along with Samba, MySQL, and other GPL'd programs, offers superior reliability and adaptability to Microsoft's operating systems, at nominal cost. GPL'd software runs on or is embedded in devices ranging from cellphones, PDAs and home networking appliances to mainframes and supercomputing clusters. Independent software developers around the world, as well as every large corporate IT buyer and seller, and a surprisingly large proportion of individual users, interact with the GPL."

- Richard Stallman, FSF President; and Eben Moglen, FSF General Counsel

Whether your business or its clients deal first-hand with free
software or not, it has become a part of the environment that is
impossible to ignore.

The nonprofit Free Software Foundation, in association with Columbia
Law School, is offering a one-day seminar on the GPL and Legal Aspects
of Free Software Development at Columbia Law School in New York City,
NY on Wednesday, September 28, 2005.

As the GPL continues to consolidate its position as the copyleft
license of choice, it becomes ever more important that lawyers,
executives, and engineers become knowledgeable of the license. The
Free Software Foundation will shortly be releasing a draft of GPLv3,
and is making available this legal seminar to help educate on the key
issues of software development and license compliance.

The seminar will be led by Daniel Ravicher, Senior Counsel to the FSF
and Executive Director of the Public Patent Foundation; Eben Moglen,
General Counsel to the FSF and Executive Director of the Software
Freedom Law Center; and David Turner, the FSF's lead GPL Compliance
Engineer.

The cost per person is $500 if you register before September 1, or
$600 if you register on or after September 1. Breakfast and lunch will
be provided. Further information about the course schedule, and
registration instructions, can be found here.

For attorneys, the seminar will almost certainly count for CLE credits
in the state of New York, and possibly other states as well. We are
awaiting final approval, and will announce the number of approved
credits when we get it.

This American Life's episode this week, "After the Flood," is an extraordinary collection of stories from New Orleans. Most extraordinary among the lot was the clear picture it gave of the work by some bit of government down there to forbid people from leaving the city. The story is told by a group of paramedics at a convention in New Orleans; it is about the force used to keep them (and others) from leaving.

However outrageous not being prepared was, however insane was the delay in reaction, this, imho, is the worst. Listen.

O'Reilly's "moral to the story" of the Katrina disaster is a perfect plan for the opposition. His basic message: see, this shows government doesn't work, so don't rely on it. The response it invites: see, this shows how we need to make government work. Government has failed. Must government fail?

(Meanwhile, Fox had some fantastic reporting on all this. Gone were the sycophants in the field. Here are two great examples, snipped from a fantastic article at Salon. (Thanks, Lauren.))

Guest blogger Cass Sunstein was on NPR's Fresh Air (the one show I'd cheat to get on) about his new book, Radicals in Robes. He didn't want me to mention it, but I don't listen (to him; I listen to NPR).

UPDATE: Apparently, while Senator Hatch has had a chance to read Cass's book, Judge Robert's has not.

I'm about half-way through this new OECD report about scientific publishing. I don't believe it is out on the OECD site, so consider this an advance copy.

The name confused me at first, but only because of blind US-centrism. "OpenCongress" is a site for researchers studying "how methodologies derived from Free/Libre and Open Source Software [FLOSS] production can be deployed by those working in the area of art, visual culture and cultural production in general."

Try^d's first album is now up: title - Public Domain. Available through Opsound and on their site.

Google has been sued by the Authors Guild, and a number of individual authors. This follows similar threats hinted at by the American Association of Publishers. The authors and the publishers consider Google's latest fantastic idea, Google Print -- a project to Google-ize 20,000,000 books -- to be "massive copyright infringement." They have asked a federal court to shut Google Print down.

It is 1976 all over again. Then, like now, content owners turned to the courts to stop an extraordinary new technology. Then, like now, copyright is the weapon of choice. But then, like now, the content owners of course don't really want the court to stop the new technology. Then, like now, they simply want to be paid for the innovations of someone else. Then, like now, the content owners ought to lose.

This is the best case to illustrate the story I told at the start of Free Culture. Property law since time immemorial had held that your land reached from the ground to the heavens. Then airplanes were invented -- a technology oblivious to this ancient law. A couple of farmers sued to enforce their ancient rights -- insisting airplanes can't fly over land without their permission. And thus the Supreme Court had to decide whether this ancient law -- much older than the law of copyright -- should prevail over this new technology.

The Supreme Court's answer was perfectly clear: Absolutely not. "Common sense revolts at the idea," Justice Douglas wrote. And with that sentence, hundreds of years of property law was gone, and the world was a much wealthier place.

So too should common sense revolt at the claims of this law suit. I'm an academic, so this is a bit biased, but: Google Print could be the most important contribution to the spread of knowledge since Jefferson dreamed of national libraries. It is an astonishing opportunity to revive our cultural past, and make it accessible. Sure, Google will profit from it. Good for them. But if the law requires Google (or anyone else) to ask permission before they make knowledge available like this, then Google Print can't exist. Given the total mess of copyright records, there is absolutely no way to enable this sort of access to our past while asking permission of authors up front. Or at least, even if Google could afford that cost, no one else could.

Google's use is fair use. It would be in any case, but the total disaster of a property system that the Copyright Office has produced reinforces the conclusion that Google's use is fair use. And for all those people who devoted years of their life to defend the right to p2p file-sharing -- here's your chance to show what this battle is really about:

Google wants to do nothing more to 20,000,000 books than it does to the Internet: it wants to index them, and it offers anyone in the index the right to opt out. If it is illegal to do that with 20,000,000 books, then why is it legal to do it with the Internet? The "authors'" claims, if true, mean Google itself is illegal. Common sense, or better, commons sense, revolts at the idea. And so too should you.

WIPO's latest destructive regulation: The Broadcasting and Webcasting Treaty. Jamie Boyle nails it.

CPTech has an action page. So too does the EFF.

songs from the commons
on MondoGlobo.net

Lisa Rein, who helped us frame and get Creative Commons going, has launched series on "Songs from the Commons" -- this week on my favorite topic, copyright term.

Barbara van Schewick has a fantastic new paper about the economics of network neutrality. As she nicely demonstrates, there is a severe threat of discrimination without network neutrality regulation, and that discrimination will reduce application-level innovation. van Schewick's work is not funded by any of the special interests involved in this issue -- nor is it sponsored by the "independent" think tanks that are funded by the special interests involved in this issue.

Grab the pdf here.

So I spend most of my life reflecting on how little progress I've made in the stuff I feel most strongly about.

But now, finally, some progress.

Dick Hardt is brilliant. Watch (and copy) the style. Learn tons from the substance. (My pride is tied to the style only).