Lessig

So I'm back on the grid, after a (never long enough) break with my family. Nothing is as cool as my kid. And though returning is tough, this news was great to return to:

You'll recall my over-the-top (but completely accurate) praise for Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks. That was published by Yale University Press, which allowed Yochai to release the book under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license (you must give attribution, you can make only noncommercial uses of the work, and any derivative must be under the same license).

Today, Jack Balkin wrote to say that Yale has now permitted him to release his book, Cultural Software, under the same CC license. Balkin's book (published in 1998) resolves a plainly more academic debate. But it uses metaphors from computer science to develop a theory of how cultures evolve. Balkin is a friend, and long before a friend, mentor for me. Nothing could make me happier than to see his great book within the CC family.

So 25 minutes after I posted the post below about Balkin's book (saying "nothing could make me happier"), the Supreme Court of New Jersey decided the appeal in the case I argued (more than 18 months ago). It is here. My client won. Ok, you're right, NJ SCt. I'm happier.

Update: The New Jersey Supreme Court's decision (5-1) is really extraordinary. It has again placed New Jersey in the lead for protecting its citizens (and especially its children). The law that granted immunity to charities for "negligence" has been interpreted to mean just "negligence." You'd think that wouldn't take years to resolve, but having it resolved is fantastically good news -- far more than even we had asked for.

Ray Gifford has announced he is stepping down from being President of PFF. There are (unfortunately) too few things I and PFF agree about. But we agree about Ray. He is a man of extraordinary integrity and insight. It is sad to see him go (but for the best of all possible reasons).

CC Salon is happening tomorrow - Wednesday, August 9th - from 6-9pm at Shine in San Francisco. CC Salon is a free, casual monthly get-together focused on conversation, networking, and presentations from people or groups who are developing projects that relate to open content and tools. CC Salon SF is now being presented in conjunction with CopyNight SF.

This month's line-up of speakers includes Hemai Parthasarathy and Barbara Cohen of the Public Library of Science, Owen Byrne of Digg, and John Buckman of Magnatune. Shannon Coulter will be DJing a set of CC music from Magnatune's catalogue.

For more information, visit this event's Upcoming.org listing.

Denise Howell has a great post about the Washington Post's plan to run a mash-up. According to the terms and conditions, as a condition of participating, the artists must agree to "grant and assign all right, title and interest in the Recording to" the Washington Post.

Good for the Washington Post -- mash-ups are an important and valuable form of creativity encouraged (and democratized) by digital technology. But I believe that the artists who create them deserve to own and hold the copyright to their new creative work. And in my view, any self-respecting artist should refuse to participate in any sharecropping mash-up. You did the work. You should own the rights to the work you did.

Check out the very cool finalists for the 2006 Wikimania awards.

John Anderson sent me a link to a fantastic collection of political mashups. The current President is a popular target, but the Nixon stuff is really great as well.

Creative Commons' free software project, ccHost, a project that "provides web-based infrastructure to support collaboration, sharing, and storage of multi-media using the Creative Commons licenses and metadata," has been named the "Best Open Source Solution" at LinuxWorld 2006. ccHost supports ccMixter. See some pictures of those who support ccHost.

Don Marti has a very cool style sheet to make it possible to turn a blog entry into a letter to Congress.

Is there such a thing as a program to simplify AddressBook cleanups? (I'm using the OS X default). I've got over 5000 entries, many automatically inserted, many many duplicates, etc. But it takes forever to delete, merge, correct the entries. I know I could dump it into a spreadsheet and do it that way, but has anyone seen code to do this more intelligently?

OpenBusiness.cc has a blog entry about a film about "piracy" and its politics in Sweden, including a bit about the Swedish Pirate Party. Appropriately enough, you can download it for free.

Want to read a book on your iPod? This cool site will convert a text into notes that can be read on an iPod. Here's my book Free Culture so converted.

Heiko has a great myspace page devoted to Net Neutrality issues -- including a Net Neutrality song as well.

So I'm leaving for Berlin for the year Monday. I am on sabbatical, and need to write tons of stuff. I will be changing significantly how I connect (project: privatizing lessig), but one thing I really need to do is to find a web master. I want to do much more in this space, but this space needs some significant reworking. If you're interested and able, please email Lauren Gelman at the Stanford CIS. There's some money to support this, but not much.