Lessig

The Science Commons needs a lawyer.

So it has been more than a year since the argument in Hardwicke. John Hardwicke continues to work extremely hard to get New Jersey to protect its children. He's asked people to write the New Jersey legislature to get them to consider one important bit of progress, Assembly Bill 2512.

E-mail the General Assembly

Things are about to get very interesting. Sun's got a cool (actually CoolThreads) new technology. Here's the announcement. But here's the really cool part: "Plans to Open Source Processor Technology to Developer Communities." "Open source" hardware? What's that mean? Stay tuned ...

The webcast (video and audio) of the NYPL debate about the Google Print (now Google Book Search) project is now up (and has been up, but you know I am perpetually behind). Note, the slide that Chis Anderson is here. Please look at it. There is lots of confusion about what is being debated here. For the three different types of access Google is considering, see the description here.

The Center for Social Media has released a fantastic report on "fair use" in film. The aim of the report is to try to state, and hence establish, norms or "best practices" that should govern "fair use" for film. This is an important effort and Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi deserve thanks for the hard work pulling the team together to produce this. Download the report here.

Wiki-Law has launched. It is exactly what you think (well, we can't all edit the laws, but you understand what I mean). It is licensed under a dual GFDL and CC-Wiki license. First steps toward interoperability. Bravo on the launch!

I've started a new podcast series with Leo Laporte and John Dvorak called "Triangulation." The idea is totally John's: pick a topic on which we all three roughly agree, and then spend 30 minutes drilling down on the layers of the subject. It is intended to be the opposite of Crossfire like malarky. Here's the first on Google Book Search.

The good stuff on "fair use" just won't stop coming (if only now we could get some good judicial decisions). The Brennan Center at NYU Law School has a great new report. Download it here.

The New Jersey Assembly has voted 63-5 to enact a law to remove any immunity for negligence in hiring in any case involving sex abuse. Essentially the same bill had been passed by the New Jersey Senate last year. The bill goes to a committee to resolve the small differences. It is expected the Senate will vote tomorrow to concur in the Assembly's action. The bill will then go to Acting Governor Codey for his signature. It is expected he will sign the bill before Christmas.

The Trenton Times has an editorial rightly praising the actions of the Assembly. But my praise goes to the person who, in my view, more than anyone, brought this matter to a decision.

John Hardwicke is the plaintiff in the case I argued (and which remains pending). But beyond his own case, he has devoted everything in the last few years of his life to getting the law fixed. Movements for justice require this sort of person. Change never happens without them. This change would not have happened, in my view, had John not done everything he did.

There are countless children who will never know to thank this man. Thankfully. But here's one father who does.

Update: The Senate has passed the bill, 39-1. It now goes to the Acting Governor.

There's an interesting discussion of the Google Book Search Project at Open Democracy.

So we have 10 days left in the Creative Commons campaign. This is not a drill. We are down to the last $100,000, and really need your support -- both for the very cool projects we're launching (see, e.g., the license interoperability project, discussed recently in Technology Review, and the two new projects announced this week), and for the very uncool pressure we're under from IRS regulations to demonstrate "public support" as a condition for keeping our (absolutely essential as in we can't live with out it) tax exempt status. So please, anything helps. Lots of anything helps lots.

So heavy handed lobbying in France has backfired. Upon a payment of $8.50 a month, file sharing music would be legal.

(Thanks Mike!)

It was a good first day -- $25,000. At this rate, I can take off Christmas. Thanks to everyone for spreading the word, and thanks to the amazing mix of people who have been giving. Any bit counts. So please jump here and let's finish this already.

Just about $7500 a day needed. Spread the word. Spread CC. Support here.

It was a slow, if happy day. But now we need $7,800 a day. Please spread the word. Please support CC.

This very funny movie was, with 34 Flickr photos that were CC-d. Simple, legal, building the Read-Write Internet. 34 out more than 7,000,000 CC-d photos on Flickr.

First the French, now the Aussies: Reports are the Australians will legalize taping shows from television, and ripping CDs to MP3 players.

Ok, these annoying posts will end, hopefully before my readership disappears. But we are extremely close. We've got three days left, and are within $25,000 of meeting our goal.

There have been lots of great questions about the goal, about what happens if we miss it, and about why we need money anyway ("aren't the licenses already written?"). We should have done better explaining all this upfront. My fault for not seeing that more clearly. But from the better-late-than-never department, here is a bit to address some of these questions.

(1) Where'd you get the goal of $225,000?

To understand this, you need to know something about the "public support test" that is part of the IRS review all tax-exempt non-profits suffer after 4 years of life. That test essentially asks, how diverse is your funding support. If most of your support comes from a few foundations, then there's a risk you'll lose your tax exempt status. I let this issue remain unresolved for too long. But this is the year the numbers will be calculated, and hence the push right now.

When we saw how much we needed to raise to pass the test, we divided up areas of support. The $225,000 is the amount we absolutely must raise from a general public appeal. If we meet that, and the other goals we've also set, then we're fine.

(2) What happens if we fail this test?

The risk is that we'll lose our public charity status. That's critical to us because some foundations are not able to support organizations without a public charity status. And however fantastic the support from the public has been so far, we still absolutely must continue to get foundation support.

(3) What do you need the money for anyway?

This is the core question I should have done lots more to address much earlier in this process. For its clear many people think CC's just a bunch of servers serving licenses. Indeed, that's precisely what CC will always be -- we've built a contingency plan to assure our licenses are served for a "limited time" (in the sense that copyright terms are for "limited times"). But right now, we're much more than a bunch of servers.

As I explained in the final post to the Lessig Letters, CC has a staff of about 20 people world wide. (I'm technically on the staff as its CEO, but I'm unpaid). Those twenty work in four separate offices. Our Berlin office manages the process of porting licenses internationally. Our London office is building the international community of the iCommons project. Boston runs the Science Commons project. And San Francisco does all the rest. That staff is underpaid (relative to their contemporaries at least), but even at bargain basement wages, it is not cheap to keep the lights on. One fourth of the staff is technical; three are lawyers. All are working extraordinarily hard to spread and build CC.

We're proud of the fact that a very high percentage of our funds goes directly to "programs and services." (82% in 2004, with 18% spent on administration, and 8% on fundraising. See our audited statements for 2004 posted here. But that's 82% of a large number. We expect that to accomplish all we've promised in 2006, our budget will be close to $2m.

What have we promised? Well, in addition to growing license adoption, and spreading the tools to integrate CC into critical content creating apps, I've signaled four key projects for the year. Two we've been quite public about: (1) the cc-commercial project, and (2) the free content license interoperability project. And then there are two more secret projects that I've described here. This is the work we have left to do. This is the work that needs your support.

So three more days if this pestering. Or one, if we can get $25,000 in the door by tomorrow.

Support CC here.

In this paper, Michael Heller introduced the concept of the "anticommons" -- a resource subject to many different "property-like" claims, thus leading to its underutilization. The context was post-Soviet Russia. That context made it sound remote. But the idea was soon domesticated in this paper by Heller and Eisenberg appearing in Science. And then the concept got its most important play in a paper by Nobel Prize winning (and conservative) economist James Buchanan and Yong Yoon, titled Symmetric Tragedies.

That's all fantastically good theory. Here, however, is the anticommons in practice. There are many more examples like this. I'll make it a practice of collecting them. Maybe enough examples will get the thick-political types to recognize (as the very much not thick Buchanan recognizes) that the issue of IP reform is not about whether you favor property or not, but whether THE PARTICULAR FORM OF PROPERTY the government has crafted operates efficiently.

(Thanks for the pointer, Tom!)

We're almost there, but the coolest (and something I had missed) is this Flickr match: $10k from Flickr and a challenge to the community to match it.

Support CC.

At 12:30pm, an envelope from Redmond appeared at the Creative Commons office. Inside, a check for $25,000. From Microsoft.

We've made our target in the most (pleasantly) surprising of ways. Thanks to everyone who helped on this, and especially those who pulled so hard at the end. Of course, more will still help lots, so no reason to stop now. Support CC.

Legal Affairs has a fantastic collection of essays about various cyberspace related legal issues by some of my favorite writers about the subject. Zittrain's piece outlines the beginning of his soon to be completed book. It shall be called Z-theory. Goldsmith and Wu give a short precis of their soon to be released book, Who Controls the Internet. And Julian Dibbell has an extremely funny story about sleuthing the tax consequences from the virtual economy.

Strongly recommended reading.