Lessig

The New York Times has an excellent piece about the Daschle debacle. It points to the fundamental point missed by the obsession with whether the former Senator('s accountant) made an error in calculating his tax: The real problem is not people who can't understand and follow tax rules (i.e., all of us, at least on the understanding part). It is a system in which former Members can trade their status as former Members for millions of dollars.

This system is an economy. It only works if those being paid millions deliver millions (plus something) in value in return. And as the business model of being a public servant more and more becomes the business of becoming a well-paid ex-public servant, public servants within the system will do whatever they can to make this economy work. Think of it as a political life insurance policy -- paid out when your public political life ends.

Daschle, of course, is the most innocent in this guilty system. His plan was to serve the public as long as he possibly could. The voters in South Dakota terminated that plan. His desire is to return to public service, working on a set of issues that he feels passionate about. Indeed, issues he actually knows something about. So no doubt, he is a good soul in a bad system.

But his goodness doesn't inoculate the system. And the system is why no one should count on real CHANGE till it, the system, gets changed.

This conference at Moritz College of Law in Columbus, OH is one of the best mixes for remix I've seen. Conference page is here.

Check out the full interview at the Booksmith site.

Zittrain's got a very smart (if I don't say so myself) review of REMIX in Nature. Note, the UK edition of REMIX is published by Bloomsbury Academic, not Penguin. And Bloomsbury Academic will be releasing the work under a CC license.

In the world of debates about network neutrality, consumption caps have an ambiguous status. Some see it as a kind of discrimination. Others, not. I've not been convinced they tend to support strategic behavior. But a recent experience in New Zealand did wonders to convince me of the harm they will do to the development of the Internet that could be.

I subscribe to TV series through iTunes. House is one of those series. When a new episode is released, my iTunes was configured to download it automatically, at least if iTunes was opened. The downloading happens the background.

In November, I was in New Zealand. After I arrived, I went to the hotel, signed up for (insanely expensive) Internet service, synced my iPhone, and turned to the task of answering the one billion emails that had filled my inbox in the time it takes to fly from SFO to New Zealand. About 30 minutes into my work, a message flashed on my screen that I had "violated the ethical rules" of the network to which I had just paid $50 for 1 days access. And because I had violated ethical rules, I was to be "fined" NZ $100 (about another $50).

Seems the service I had paid $50 to purchase had a 1GB download cap attached to it. My House episode was 1.5GB (stupidly, iTunes pushes you buy HD). So midway through the download, the service cut off my connection and charge my room the fine for unethical behavior.

No doubt, Internet in New Zealand is expensive (though more competition may help). And of course, 1GB is ordinarily quite sufficient for normal use (though when I prepare a talk, it is quite easy for me to consume much more than that as I find stuff (including videos) to include in my talk). And obviously, I had agreed to the contract, and whether intentionally or not, I had violated the limits of the conflict.

But the point is this: When companies like Time Warner suggest bandwidth caps are just about stopping "piracy," that's not quite true. They're also about stopping lots of other business models that try to leverage the real potential of fast, cheap Internet access (assuming of course we can get fast, cheap Internet, or keep it where we've got it).

So I'm the first to agree that the structure of compensation on Wall Street was begging for just this sort of disaster. But I don't get the wisdom of the pay cap.

The pay cap means there will be two kinds of firms -- one that can pay people whatever it wants; one that is capped (at different levels no doubt). But then the best employees from the capped firms can move to the uncapped firms, leaving the, well, not best employees overseeing the recovery of this now government invested firms.

Why do we want to be creating an incentive for not quite the best managers to be managing the recovery of firms we're financing?

A bunch of you have forwarded to me the story about the AP threatening Shepard Fairey for copyright infringement. The Stanford Center's Fair Use Project is representing Fairey, so I'm a bit constrained about what I can say just now. More when there can be more.

From the Creative Commons blog:

YouTube just made an incredibly exciting announcement: it’s testing an option that gives video owners the ability to allow downloads and share their work under Creative Commons licenses. The test is being launched with a handful of partners, including Stanford, Duke, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UCTV.

We are always looking for ways to make it easier for you to find, watch, and share videos. Many of you have told us that you wanted to take your favorite videos offline. So we’ve started working with a few partners who want their videos shared universally and even enjoyed away from an Internet connection.

Many video creators on YouTube want their work to be seen far and wide. They don’t mind sharing their work, provided that they get the proper credit. Using Creative Commons licenses, we’re giving our partners and community more choices to make that happen. Creative Commons licenses permit people to reuse downloaded content under certain conditions.

Visit YouTube’s blog for information. And if you’re are a partner who wants to participate, fill out the YouTube Downloads - Partner Interest form.

The anger and activism at a rule in New Zealand requiring Internet service be terminated upon a mere accusation of copyright infringement is growing.

As mentioned, the Fair Use Project at Stanford's CIS is representing Shepard Fairey in his suit against the AP. To that end, we'd be grateful for some net-based knowledge. How many photos are there "like" the beautiful photograph that Mannie Garcia took (the one on the left; the one on the right is a CC licensed photo taken by Steve Jurvetson)? Can you send any examples to shep_use@pobox.com?

Also, please send any favorite examples of photos used as visual references for other works of art. We lawyers don't know much, but we can learn pretty quickly.

Thanks for any help.

Of course, no one will believe this, but this event was actually scheduled before the AP threatened Shepard Fairey. It is the last of my REMIX events, which was the last of my copyright/cyber books. Tickets here.

I will be speaking at the "Legally Speaking" event at the University of California Hastings College of the Law on March 19, 2009. Ticket and more info can be found here.

Jeff Flake (AZ-6, Republican) has introduced a resolution to call for an investigation about the relationship between earmarks and campaign funding. Having just finished Kaiser's amazing book, So Damn Much Money, I am confirmed in a suspicion I had before the election: that Flake/McCain were right to be so exercised about earmarks, and Obama/Dems were wrong.

The point is not the total amount of earmarks. Indeed, for a liberal like me, I'm keen to see the government spend money (wisely, at least). The point instead is the corruption that the earmarking system engenders. The history of earmarks is the history of a business model, with lobbyists at the core, a Congress dependent upon campaign funding at the edge, and a world of staffers, bureaucrats and former Members keen not to upset their future employers (the lobbyists).

But of course, one simple solution to this "problem" with earmarks would be to remove the corrupting connection -- to campaign finance. And the simplest way to do that would be to follow Teddy Roosevelt's other fantastic idea from 100 years ago -- Citizen Funded Elections.

Thus, yet another reason to join the strike -- don't give money to politicians who don't irrevocably commit to citizen funded elections.

Carl Malamud has launched -- and we all should support -- a campaign to become head of the GPO. I can't imagine a more exciting appointment. Sometimes an agency needs STASIS. Sometimes it needs CHANGE. Gov't tech is certainly in the second category, and no one I know of could more effectively deliver on the commitment to open government than he.

Join the campaign.

Amazon has caved into demands from the Authors Guild that it disable the ability of the Kindle to read a book aloud. This is very bad news.

We had this battle before. In 2001, Adobe released e-book technology that gave rights holders (including publishers of public domain books) the ability to control whether the Adobe e-book reader read the book aloud. The story got famous when it was shown that one of its public domain works -- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland -- was marked to forbid the book to be read aloud. (Here's a piece I wrote about this in 2001).

Now the issue is back. The Authors Guild has objected because Amazon's Kindle 2 has a function built in that enables the book to be read aloud. So when, for example, you're commuting, you can plug your Kindle 2 into your MP3 jack and have the book read aloud.

Amazon rightly argued that this did not violate any of the exclusive rights granted by copyright law to the copyright owners. In that, Amazon is exactly right. But nonetheless, it will now enable publishers to decide whether the Kindle books they sell will permit the book to be read aloud. And of course, that includes public domain books.

So here we go again -- How long till we can buy Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and be told that this book "cannot be read aloud"?

But the bigger trend here is much more troubling: Innovative technology company (Amazon (Kindle 2), Google (Google Books)) releases new innovative way to access or use content; so-called "representatives" of rights owners, Corleone-like, baselessly insist on a cut; innovative technology company settles with baseless demanders, and we're all arguably worse off.

We're worse off with the Kindle because if the right get set by the industry that publishers get to control a right which Congress hasn't given them -- the right to control whether I can read my book to my kid, or my Kindle can read a book to me -- users and innovators have less freedom. And we may be worse off with Google Books, because (in ways not clear when the settlement was first reported) the consequence of the class action mechanism may well disable users and innovators from doing what fair use plainly entitled Google to do.