Lessig

Citizens' Funding of the Nation's Elections made it into round #2 at Change.org. Here's 7 minutes about why it needs to be in the final list as well. Voting runs from today till January 15. Vote here.

Beautifully put by Fred Benenson:

NIN's CC-Licensed Best-Selling MP3 Album

Fred Benenson, January 5th, 2009

NIN's Creative Commons licensed Ghosts I-IV has been making lots of headlines these days.

First, there's the critical acclaim and two Grammy nominations, which testify to the work's strength as a musical piece. But what has got us really excited is how well the album has done with music fans. Aside from generating over $1.6 million in revenue for NIN in its first week, and hitting #1 on Billboard's Electronic charts, Last.fm has the album ranked as the 4th-most-listened to album of the year, with over 5,222,525 scrobbles.

Even more exciting, however, is that Ghosts I-IV is ranked the best selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon's MP3 store.

Take a moment and think about that.

NIN fans could have gone to any file sharing network to download the entire CC-BY-NC-SA album legally. Many did, and thousands will continue to do so. So why would fans bother buying files that were identical to the ones on the file sharing networks? One explanation is the convenience and ease of use of NIN and Amazon's MP3 stores. But another is that fans understood that purchasing MP3s would directly support the music and career of a musician they liked.

The next time someone tries to convince you that releasing music under CC will cannibalize digital sales, remember that Ghosts I-IV broke that rule, and point them here.

Now that she won't be my Dean, I am free to say the following. And I am inspired to say the following by my sense that there's a misperception among some about exactly why Elena Kagan's appointment is so important.

Everyone knows the Solicitor General is the government's path to the Supreme Court. But some write as if the job is about arguing in the Supreme Court. That's a mistake. No doubt, that's a part, though historically the SG has argued a small percentage of the cases (sometimes as low as 1 or 2 a term).

Much more important is the policymaking function of the office. The SG must decide on the strategy for interacting with the Supreme Court. He or she must decide which issues to push, which to hold back, how to frame the issues, and how best to maintain the (deserved) reputation of the office as a principled expositor of the (administration's view of the) law.

Having known Elena since I began teaching (she and I started together at Chicago), I can say that I can't imagine a better choice for this job. Granted, she is not an oral advocate -- though again, that's not the job, and having seen her teach (always at the very top at Harvard and Chicago), I have no doubt she'll be superb as an oral advocate.

But she knows the administration cold (after years in the Clinton administration, and many more years studying and teaching administrative law), and, more importantly (and extremely rare for an academic), she has an extraordinary ability to productively engage disagreement. That's the real success from her time at Harvard (I used to think it was impossible to be loved as Dean of Harvard; Elena is loved by everyone). She is a straight talking, brilliant strategist and strong negotiator, who holds herself to insanely high standards. People see that and respect that -- one bit to the key of her success.

As one reflects upon the fact that the most entrenched disagreements the Obama administration will face over the next 8 years will be with a conservative Court that doesn't need to be reelected, it is quickly apparent that the role of the SG is going to be critical. On a list of many (if not all) fantastic appointments by Obama, this one is brilliant. Everyone is saying as much, but few, I think, recognize just how brilliant this is.

Tomorrow, Change Congress is launching a funders' strike. We pledge NOT to give to any candidate who doesn't support Citizens' Funded Elections. Join us at change-congress.org or strike4change.org.

UPDATE

Here's the original segment.

Sam did the first remix of my Colbert appearance.

Jim Vanaria did another.

This is the first video remix I've seen.

Here's a remix from the Eclectic Method Mix.

And the audio to the show is available to be remixed on ccMixter here.

Colbert says (or more accurately, "says") you can't remix this. I say please do.

So here's an update on the Remix COLBERT/lessig project.

As I first reported, after the event, I was sent some very cool remixes. They're available in my first blog entry about the show.

Then ccMixter -- Creative Commons fantastic remix site, that allows you to track who remixed what -- launched a remix thread. You can see those here.

Then this morning I saw the link to the IndabaMusic site, which is running a contest around the clip. There are now about 20 remixes available, and more than 100 in the works. You can see those here.

All of the remixes in the ccMixter/IndabaMusic domains are CC licensed. The source, again, is my segment (the portion of the Colbert Report in which I am a joint copyright owner.) As that is CC-BY, anyone is free for any purpose (save endorsement purposes) to use it as you wish.

Ok, San Francisco, sadly, I report: the final REMIX reading will be Wednesday, 14 January, at 7:30pm, at Booksmith - 1644 Haight Street, San Francisco, CA 94117 (map). And as I've got no more books coming out before the summer, that means this will be the final book reading in San Francisco as well.

To celebrate the sadness, I'll be giving away the swag I got at the Colbert Report. Plus 10 (fake) Colbert campaign posters that I tried to ambush Colbert with.

So come. Bring your office. And your grandmother. And anyone else you find on the street.

From the op-ed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal by IBM chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano, "Let's Spend on Broadband and the Power Grid":

We shouldn't undertake projects simply for the sake of creating economic activity. Rather than just stimulate, we should transform.

Rick Boucher is taking over the Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet (renamed Telecommunications Subcommittee). This is great news. Boucher is an inspiration in the House. This is a critical committee for change.

Notice an important new feature in the world of YouTube -- a "Click to download" link. YouTube is rolling this out slowly, initially with content that aspires to be consistent with principles of open government. I'm told it will be offered more generally. In any case, it is an important development. There have always been hacks for slurping down YouTube videos. But it is a valuable step that YouTube encourage and support this sharing.

Here's 4:51 from the Open Rights Group on the proposal to extend the copyright term for sound recordings in Europe. (Recall, we extended our term to match the Europeans, but then, surprise surprise, we actually overshot the Europeans in important categories, leading the Europeans now to argue they need to extend the term to match the Americans.)

There's an event on 27 Jan in Brussels to discuss the issue.

Freeing the source, for others to build upon. Read about Al Jazeera's decision in Fred's post for the CC blog:

Fred Benenson, January 13th, 2009

Al Jazeera is releasing 12 broadcast quality videos today shot in Gaza under Creative Commons’ least restrictive Attribution license. Each professionally recorded video has a detailed information page and is hosted on blip.tv allowing for easy downloads of the original files and integration into Miro. The value of this footage is best described by an International Herald Tribune/New York Times article describing the release:

In a conflict where the Western news media have been largely prevented from reporting from Gaza because of restrictions imposed by the Israeli military, Al Jazeera has had a distinct advantage. It was already there.

More importantly, the permissive CC-BY license means that the footage can be used by anyone including, rival broadcasters, documentary makers, and bloggers, so long as Al Jazeera is credited.
There’s more information over at Al Jazeera’s CC repository, and in our press release. You can also add the Al Jazeera repository to your Miro feeds by clicking here.

From a correspondent:

My name is Marco Scialdone. I'm an italian lawyer involved in copyright issues.

... I think you'll find interesting the following story. It shows how copyright law can struggle creativity and, above all, how copyright lawyers are unable to understand the potential and the beauty of this new culture enabled by the Net.

Recently, an article published on Artsblog has brought to my attention the Romaeuropa Web Factory Competition. The competition is about four different areas: video-art, electronic music, writing text, development of an advertising spot.

The regulation, at article 8, provides that: "It is not permitted by the participants, any activity of mashup, remix and any other kind of manipulation, in any case, the result of mashup works, remix and any other kind of manipulation cannot in any way participate in the competition."

The clause above sounds absurd at least for two reasons.

The first, and most obvious, is because the forms of art that are mentioned, in particular video art and electronic music, use techniques such mashup, remix, manipulation and these techniques are, at the same time, their cultural and philosophical substratum and the raw material for their implementation.

The second, however, relates to a presumption of unlawfulness of those forms of art. The regulation does not seem to take into consideration that the video or the work may have been produced assembling or manipulating works whose licenses permit that type of activity and, therefore (i.e. Creative Commons Licences, or at least, many of them), make it perfectly legal (in terms of claims of the authors) the derivative works. Still, the regulation do not take into account that the activity of remix or mash-up could be based on material fallen into the public domain and therefore freely reusable to build on the past and create new forms of art.

For these reasons i decided to join some artists in writing a letter to the foundation asking a change in the regulation.

The object of the letter is "Freedom for Remix". You can find it here (Italian).

My best regards,

Marco Scialdone

Here's my Dopplr report for 2008. My flights were the equivalent of 5.4 Hummers, and I travel as fast as a Kangaroo. I can deploy offsets to deal with the first problem. Not sure what can be done about the second.

Update: So I missed the most troubling feature of this initially. According to Dopplr, I have a much higher velocity and much larger carbon footprint than Obama in 2008. Though he spent more nights away from home (then again, he doesn't live in California).

Among the less discussed but insanely important issues Obama needs his CTO to think through -- how to do security consistent with our (now restored) values. And on the must read list: The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.

From the Huffington Post:

Do sex, campaign money, and Change Congress's new "donor strike" go together?

According to U.S. News & World Report, they do. Here's an excerpt from their story, "Sex, Campaign Money, and Cleaning Up Politics":

Don't like how our politics are paid for? Some people who agree are pushing what I can only call the Lysistrata campaign finance reform plan. In the ancient Greek comedy, women withheld sex from their soldier husbands until they agreed to end an ongoing war.

Substitute sex for money and you have what the folks over at Change Congress are pushing: that donors go "on strike," refusing to give their money to pols until a campaign finance overhaul is passed (specifically, they favor a system whereby people limiting themselves to small donations would get matching government funds).

They say that they've gotten no-contribution pledges from people who gave $400,000 to federal candidates in the last cycle.

So, you heard it from U.S. News & World Report first! Change Congress is bringing sexy back...to the campaign finance reform debate. (Step aside, Justin Timberlake.)

The "donor strike" has amazing momentum, but we need your help to keep going. There are two things you can do today.

First, if you haven't already, join the strike. We're at $422,000 in donations withheld--can you help us get to $500,000? With every new striker, we are increasing the pressure on Congress to pass fundamental reform. It's easy, just click here.

Second, because Change Congress is fighting the special interests, we don't get money from the fat cats. So we depend on people like you. We're setting a goal of raising $100,000 in the next month--starting today. This will allow us to really turn up the pressure on Congress -- including targeted events in local districts -- to make sure politicians are well aware of how much money they're losing if they oppose reform. If you care about cleaning up our democracy, please help us keep our successful "donor strike" campaign going by chipping in here today.

The donor strike's also been featured in the Associated Press, National Journal, Huffington Post, ABC News, and Green Mountain Daily (Vermont). Working together, we're making progress on this fundamental reform issue--and your help today will greatly help us keep the momentum going.

Thanks for helping to change Congress.
--Lawrence Lessig & Joe Trippi

So argues William Hurley (to President Obama) at InfoWorld.

Breaking news from The Huffington Post:

Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community's top legislative priority.

Participants on the October 17 call -- including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG -- were urged to persuade their clients to send "large contributions" to groups working against the Employee Free Trade Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill.

...Donations of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to Republican senatorial campaigns were needed, they argued..."If a retailer has not gotten involved in this, if he has not spent money on this election, if he has not sent money to [former Sen.] Norm Coleman and all these other guys, they should be shot. They should be thrown out their goddamn jobs," Marcus declared.

This will ONLY change when elections are citizen funded. Join our strike4change to (1) starve the beast, (2) just say no, or (3) fix this absurd system -- now. No money until a candidate commits to citizen funded elections.