Lessig

British humorist Stephen Fry has produced a video to mark the 25th Anniversary of RMS's launch of the GNU operating system. Watch and celebrate here.

This is an extraordinary milestone to mark. I'll keep a list of celebratory videos here (email me with any links). Congratulations to Richard on the success of this movement launched as an idea 25 years ago (September 27 is the date), and more importantly, thank you to Richard for this movement launched as an idea 25 years ago.

Very cool news this morning: the latest version of Picasa Web Albums now, like Flickr, supports Creative Commons licenses.

A tongue-in-cheek reply to my addition to GOP.com's BarackBook.

My next (and the last) copyright/culture book, Remix, will be coming out this fall, and I'm miles behind in preparing a site. If you're able to volunteer to help with the DESIGN, I'd be grateful. Please email me, and thanks!

Update: Thanks for all the offers. I think I'm set on this.

SusanG at the DailyKos has a callout for John Cole's post about earmarks. As Cole put's it:

The total national debt, as I write this, is $9,679,000,000,000.00 (nine and a half trillion).

The Budget for 2008 is close to $3,000,000,000,000.00 (three trillion).

Our budget deficit for this year is going to range in between $400-500,000,000,000.00 (four hundred to five hundred billion, give or take a few billion).

The total value of earmarks in 2008 will be approximately $18,000,000,000.00 (eighteen billion).

In other words, when McCain talks about earmarks, he is talking about 3% of our annual budget deficit, .6% of our annual budget, and a number too small to even report when discussing our national debt. Or, put another way, he is talking about two months in Iraq, something he wants to keep going indefinitely.

Not only are they lying about Palin’s involvements with earmarks, they are just not being serious about the horrible economic problems we face. These are not serious people.

I think this is missing the point. True, earmarks are small potatoes. But the problem with earmarks is that they've become an engine of corruption. The explosion after the Republicans took over under Newt was because they were a newly deployed source of influence, designed (too often) to induce or repay a gift (or what others call, a campaign contribution).

Liberals should be as upset with this as conservatives (though for different reasons no doubt). And we should especially (imho) resist the "if McCain believes it it must be wrong" trope. McCain is right to criticize earmarks. Whether he (or Palin) can do it credibly is a separate matter.

From Politico:

Asked what work John McCain did as Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate's top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry.

"He did this," Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry.

Whistle-Safe.org is a site designed to lower to cost of whistleblowers coming forward, by offering to protect their anonymity. In this climate of a scandal a day, useful progress.

Some Stanford alumni have started a travel project for Obama, TraveforChange.org. The basic idea -- use frequent flyer miles to help Obama volunteers get to places where they can do some good.

So here's an embarrassing confession: I'm a member of the Clear program. If you fly a lot, you will have seen a growing number of airports with this beautiful blue cube at a security check point. If you're not paying attention, you might not understand what they are. These are premium security check points, meaning you pay Clear a fee, hand over some biometric data, and they give you a Clear card. Then you get to use the Clear card to pass through this special security line. (Weirdly, you still need to produce a photo ID, but never mind).

Why would anyone ever do this?

I find the worst part of travel is the uncertainty caused by variable events -- the need to bury 60 minutes to be sure that you can get through security when 80% of the time it would only take 20 minutes. For people like Joi Ito (and to a lesser extent, me, meaning people who travel way too much), that adds a huge amount of wasted time to the travel schedule.

The great advantage to Clear is that you are 95% certain that security will take no more than 10 minutes. Usually it is much much less. Meaning you can shave tons of time off of time at the airport, meaning you can add lots of time to time at home (for me, with my kids).

For some of you, the advantage may well be worth the cost. And if it is (and here's the real reason I'm advertising this here), you could lower the cost to me if you use this referral code -- [removed -- see comments] -- when you sign up here. That code, in other words, gets me a month free.

Scandalous, I know, me pushing this privacy-reducing technology, though beyond the biometric data, I'm not sure what additional data I'm actually providing to the world beyond what is already there, and I'm not a deep skeptic of biometrics. But there's no requirement you use it (you're free, of course, to go through the standard line if you want to), and there's lots of promises about how the data won't be used (though of course, in a world of immunity granted to corporations cooperating with the government, no one should trust those promises). But here's how I calculate it for me: I flew about 50 times last year. If this reliably saves me 30 minutes each flight, that's 25 hours saved. At minimum wage, that just about pays for the privilege. And at the value I place on time with my kids, it pays for itself many many times over.

Russ Gooberman wrote to tell a happy story about Major League Baseball.

A month ago, I created a mashup clip of some MLB's All-Star Game Home Run Derby. Specifically, I wanted to feature the record-breaking home run streak of Texas Rangers youngster, Josh Hamilton. So, I cut up some YouTube footage of his longest homerun of the contest, and set it to the audio of the final homerun sequence of the movie, The Natural. The next day, the mashup was featured on SportsIllustrated.com as their "Video of the Day." Here's My Mashup.

The following day, MLB Advanced Media sent a trademark claim to YouTube, and had the video taken down. I was sent this notice from YouTube:

"This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by MLB Advanced Media claiming that this material is infringing:"

Using the YouTube notification process, I sent a counter-notification to MLB Advanced Media, which read as follows:

"Under established Fair Use principles, if a work is considered transformative, it does not represent an infringement. This video in particular, is extremely transformative. First of all, it takes less than a minute of footage out of an over three hour exhibition. Secondly, the footage is edited differently than the original telecast. Thirdly, the entire soundtrack has been removed and replaced. Fourthly, the footage itself has been altered, added to, subtracted from, and has had the meaning changed altogether.

The work shows ONE of over thirty home runs Mr. Hamilton hit in the contest. Clearly, this cannot be any kind of substitution for the actual footage of the event. It is provided as symbolic footage to give historical context. As such, it specifically helps the interests of Major League Baseball in publicizing the significence of this event.

The purpose of this transformative piece was to provide commentary on the event itself, and to compare the event to a historically important moment in baseball history. This quality of providing commentary to further public discourse, is another specific component of Fair Use doctrine, that allows for the use of copyrighted material.

This piece is fully non-commercial. The website behind the creation of this piece takes in zero revenue, and is a free entertainment service. Non-commercial use is another standard by which copyrighted material is allowable for re-use.

The historical recording and capturing of Hamilton's Derby performance belongs to Major League Baseball. The event, in itself, does not. The interpretation of such an event in the public discourse is not for Major League Baseball to determine or influence. These events that affect our perceptions of our national pastime cannot be copyrighted. The discussion and dissemination of ideas relating to them cannot be censored.

There are countless cases of MLB pursuing copyright infringements that go beyond their rights as copyright holders. Evidence of overzealous prosecution has been abundant. This Sisyphean struggle to stop any and all interpretations of MLB material will eventually fail.

In the past, Major League Baseball has been a pioneering force in American progressive social movements (see Jackie Robinson' s breaking of the color barrier, or Curt Flood's resistance changing the face of American labor movements). It is a shame that Major League Baseball has chosen to drag its feet and has failed to encourage a more open dissemination of information in this matter."

Within one day, not only had MLB Advanced Media relinquished its claim on the video, but had gone out of its way to feature the mashup on the official MLB entertainment blog.

So, I guess the moral of the story is that if you take the time to use the proper channels, and let the giant media conglomerates know you're willing to put up a fight, they may decide that you're not worth their time. Hopefully we can use these tactics to forward the cause of fair use and creative commons-owned properties.

Happy news indeed.

Trust: Reaching The 100 Million Missing Voters, originally released in 2004 as a collection of essays, has been re-released online under a CC BY-NC license, by (my friend) the author, Farai Chideya, is credited and it is for non-commercial purposes.

You can download the first chapters here, with more to follow as the election continues.

Susan Crawford's fantastic idea -- One Web Day -- happened today. I participated in New York. My five minutes is in the extended entry. PDF is here.

Mark Dery has a nice piece in PRINT magazine against the Orphan Works Bill.

The ever-fantastic Sunlight Foundation has a launched a Public Markup of the Financial Industry Bailout Bill. Check it out here.

I was intrigued by Governor Palin's hint in her ABC interview that her experience was comparable to other VPs across history. I was surprised by how incorrect she was.

Here's a mp4 version.

Here's the version at blip.tv.

Here's a version at the Internet Archives.

A number of great and interesting comments were made in response to my privacy-compromising (and as some said, ad-placement) confession. I've posted some replies. Thanks for the comments.

As reported on the LA Times blog, During the primaries, a bunch of us (both Democrats and Republicans) called on the parties to demand that the networks adopt "open" or "free debate" principles, to assure that the debates would be available to everyone to use or reuse as they choose.

We're back. In the extended entry below is another letter, signed by another bipartisan mix, calling on McCain and Obama to commit to "open debate principles." You can get a PDF of the letter here.

From the CC blog:

The Websters’ Dictionary: How to Use the Web to Transform the World is a newly released book on “how to create communities of thousands [...] and channel their energy to effect political, social and cultural transformation.” Written by tech-advocate and political theorist Ralph Benko, The Websters’ Dictionary aims to educate on the web’s potential to motivate groups and enact change on broader issues, all while keeping in mind the complexities inherent in organizing movements online.

While the book is aimed at those with mid-level web experience, The Websters’ Dictionary has salient points that should resonate across technical prowess and familiarity. The Websters’ Dictionary is available for free PDF download - after taking the “Websters’ Oath” - and is being released under a CC BY-NC license, meaning that it can be reused in any number of ways, as long as future works credit Ralph Benko and are noncommercial in intent. Hardcover and paperbacks versions of the book should be available in October.

From Students for Free Culture:

Free Culture 2008 Conference
October 11-12, 2008
Chevron Auditorium, International House
2299 Piedmont Ave, Berkeley CA

http://conference.freeculture.org

What's Free Culture?
Free Culture is a movement focused on creativity and innovation, communication and free expression, public access to knowledge and civil liberties. Students for Free Culture at Berkeley is proudly hosting the Free Culture 2008 Conference over Columbus Day weekend.

Conference Details
The conference will be held October 11th at the Chevron Auditorium at UC Berkeley. Anyone interested in politics, tech policy, art, and culture will find something to like—we'll be featuring keynote presentations from Pam Samuelson of Boalt Hall, Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law, and Mozilla Corporation CEO John Lilly. We are also convening panels on transparent politics, remix culture, copyright reform, and open access to knowledge and medicine. Richard Rinehart of Berkeley Art Museum will present the groundbreaking OpenMuseum project and Berkeley's OKAPI group will demonstrate its virtual recreation of Çatalhöyük island for the Open Archaeology project. Filmmaker Nina Paley will be present for a screening of her groundbreaking film Sita Sings the Blues. And on October 12th, SFC will present a slate of intimate "unconference" style workshops on the Berkeley campus. Join guests from Creative Commons, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and others!

We're asking attendees to donate what they think the conference is worth, whether that's $1 or $100. Register today at http://conference.freeculture.org/register/!

As advertised, I'm speaking. I'll introduce my new book, Remix, which will be released that week. (And fear not, there's a very cool Creative Commons surprise to be announced then (iow: please don't sweat copyright pages)).

Ben Jones has a piece about my book, Free Culture, being made available on Kindle, a platform that uses DRM.

In my view, the "free culture" test for a work is whether it is available freely -- not whether it is also available not freely. "Free Culture" is available freely -- meaning, it is licensed freely here. One can put that freely licensed version on a Kindle, freely. I hadn't known my publisher was going to make Free Culture available on the Kindle, but now that they have, I'd be very keen to have a version I can make freely available on the "Free Culture" remix page.

"But shouldn't," one could well argue, "you not support DRM technologies at all?" That's a valid position taken by many I respect. My view, however, is that one supports the campaign to avoid debilitating DRM by making culture freely available. New technologies will try all sorts of new deals to make things competitive. So long as free, open format versions are available to compete with that, I am not concerned about the DRM'd version existing as well.

Ben's post claims that one would violate "the DMCA by circumventing the DRM, it is hard to put the pdf version of the book on the Kindle." I don't get this. There's no violating of the DMCA when one adapts the format of a work as permitted by the copyright holder. Indeed, I should think the DMCA is violated by any effort to restrict the rights granted by a license -- including the CC license rights. So any problem here is not the user's -- it is Kindle's.

Anyway, I may be wrong about this. And I'll be listening to see.