Lessig

Jerry Lawson has a great piece for lawyers about weblogs, or bLAWgs as I've seen them referred to.

The W3C has taken an extremely important step. The step was taken in the context of patent policy. The substance of the step is important enough: W3C has taken the position that it will not recommend a standard that depends upon a patent that is not offered on a Royalty-Free basis. Some wanted a stronger position -- no patents at all. But the W3C position will at least assure that Web standards will not be blocked by patents.

But the more important decision is the procedure taken in releasing this decision: W3C has released its public version of the decision with the reasoning behind the direcor's action attached. Danny Weitzner reports this is a first. I don't know of any example to contradict that claim. Let it be the first of many from this important organization that continues the work of the web's founder.

Stanford is hosting this year's iLaw program -- a program begun by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. It is the third American edition of the course (we've given it twice overseas as well -- once in Singapore, and this March in Brazil), and it is getting, imho, quite good. The class is always a mix of lawyers, government officials, technologists, and others, always from across the world.

If you're interested, check it out here.

I got a surprising number of replies to my post about online banks. Bank of America has the most loyal customers by far, with 2.5x the number of positive responses over the next highest rank. Second place was tied between USAA and Citibank. Wells Fargo, HSBC, American Express and eTrade also got strong recommendations.

PC Banker got a particularly strong recommendation from someone I know who apparently has a very interesting passion researching such questions. And First Internet Bank of Indiana got a similarly strong set of recommendations.

There were also a surprising number of missives about the value of local credit unions (indeed, adding them together, credit unions were also tied in second place). I am a member of the Stanford Federal Credit Union, but it has discontinued its online access with Quicken.

The most surprising response, however, came from Citibank itself. On the day I posted the question, a very kind manager at Citibank called to tell me he had been reading my webpage (!). Within a day, all problems with my account at Citibank had been corrected, and my account is live. I didn't quite know how to respond to this, but I count this as extra effort by Citibank, and so I'll give them a try. More when there's something useful to report.

Meanwhile, on the power of blogs...

Andy Orlowski has an interesting dump on blogs in the Register. But he also makes an interesting mistake.

I'm not sure how one could ever say what the impact of "blogs" is universally. Yet by asking the question like that, you miss important differences in different countries. Joi's "Emergent Democracy" stuff might seem odd from the perspective of England or the United States (because we of course have such healthy democracies, and soon we'll have three media companies to tell us so); but within the structures of Japan, this channel becomes very significant. Likewise with the equivalent effect (though not through blogs) that has yet to be understood in the Korean election.

The link to teenage girls is even more mysterious, and yet to be understood. The other extraordinarily significant movement in Japan -- dojinshi comics -- is also said to have been sparked by teenage girls. That movement now gathers over 400,000 people twice a year to trade in those comics. And Sifry's estimated number of blogs: 400,000.

Just a coincidence? Who are we to say?

There's an important story about the Korean election that is not well understood by many, including me. I have read all sorts of accounts, but none really seems to capture it. David Moynihan tells an interesting part of the story in a comment to my post on "girrrl revolutions." That suggested the idea of a community-telling.

So here's the question: There was a surprising effect produced by the youth in the last Korean election -- surprising because the pollsters missed it -- and that surprise was in part facilitated by technology. But what's the real story?

Advanced warning: I intend to be an editor of this community-telling, so off topic and unhelpful posts will be removed.

Evan Hunt has a long-ish post about ways to understand environmentalism, both for tangible and intangible resources. As he writes, protecting the commons is about making sure that in the future "you won't have to be rich to breathe fresh air" -- or work for a major studio to be free to build upon our past with film. I love work that pulls together different fields into a common frame. This does it nicely.

Lawrence Solum and Minn Chung have a comprehensive and powerful view of layers in network architecture, nicely linking that architecture to policy implications, in particular, how governments regulate.

I wrote this piece for CIO Insight, arguing that companies ought to let customers spy on their customer service agents. But I wonder: When you get a recording while on hold that says, "Calls may be monitored to assure quality assurance," doesn't the passive voice already authorize you, the customer, to tape as well?

"What you don't understand, Lessig, is that your bullshit 'open' or 'free' types will never -- NEVER -- be able to compete with corporate organization. Squabbles-about-egos-pretending-to-be-about-the-merits can never be quashed. There is no one to say 'enough, let's move on.' So every great idea that your type creates, we'll just wait, watch, and then take. Always." paraphrased from a conversation with someone from within one of the (how many are there?) largest proprietary code companies

Aaron has been trying to prove this skeptic wrong. See his plea and proposal here. I know from email early on that Dave too has the desire that progress be made. Let this be the proof that the skeptic is wrong.

I've had so many exchanges in email and offline about the role the Internet is playing in this election, and I continue to be struck by the will of many to believe that it matters not at all.

But let's remember this: We're about to see an amazing shift in passion and attention in this Democratic Primary. To those who insist the Internet matters not at all, what explains this?

The issue is not how many people you have on your mailing list; the issue is how many are writing and persuading and building a community around your candidacy. One candidate has done that bettter than anyone else. Congratulations, Governor. Whether or not this is how campaigns should be run, it is exactly how elections should be won.

A great petition of artists is speaking back at the RIAA. Congratulations.

So the legislative fight against spam is going no where. There will probably be a bill, but it has been designed simply to make sure that large traditional companies are still free to send unsolicited commercial email. Senator McCain has added a nice innovation that will make it easier to hold people responsible for UCE. But the concerted effort to avoid labeling will mean in the end, the legislation does not work.

Which has led me to a bit of code which I had intended to resist: challenge-response. My mail now goes through Mailblocks.com (which annoyingly has a pop-up to warn people away from any browser except Microsoft's, and which even more annoyingly is enforcing patent protection against other challenge response systems) but so far, it has worked.

"Worked." "Worked" means I don't have literally hundreds of emails in my inbox each morning that are junk. "Worked" means I don't therefore have to delete 95% of the emails in my inbox because they are junk. "Worked" means I therefore don't erase emails which were not junk but which one inevitably will when so much is junk.

But "worked" also means that the first time you (humans out there, not bots) send me email, you've got to go through a web-based ritual to authenticate that you're human. Of all the mandated authentication our society requires these days, this seems about the most harmless. Indeed, it might even help.

So a bunch of people in San Francisco (with Brewster Kahle, who's behind all great ideas behind it) are building a free wireless network for the city, called sflan. My wife's and my house is to be sflan16, and last weekend the team came to the house to install the antenna.

Our house has just undergone major renovations (a 9 month project which is 6 months late; the other 9 month project is humming along just fine with eta 2 weeks), and we included in those renovations a conduit from the roof to a server room in the basement.

But when we tried to run the Ethernet cable from the roof to the basement, we discovered that the conduit makes 3 90-degree turns and one 45-degree turn, and it was not at all clear how one pushes a cable through such a maze.

So of course we turned first to the internet. I typed in a totally natural language question into Google (which I find these days is increasingly the best method): something like "how do you thread a cable through a long conduit with 90 degree angles." The first post that came up was a thread from some list titled Threading fiber through a long conduit. This thread reported no good luck, but it had the kernel of an idea: a vacuum cleaner.

So we took a bit of foam, tied it to the end of a roll of kite string, and connected a small Shop-Vac at the other end of the conduit (which is at least 50 feet long). Bingo. The key, it seems, is to have a big but light obstruction, and google at hand.

Chairman Powell will receive another letter that he will rather not have received. This one is from Congressman Kind and Boucher, calling on the Chairman to preserve neutrality on the Internet. It's not quite 700,000 letters (yet, at least), but this campaign does have the support of a large number of interests, including a few large companies (Microsoft, Amazon, and Disney, if it would only have the courage to stand up to the cable companies).

Tim Wu and I filed an Ex Parte with the FCC on this. Stay tuned for more.

Dave Winer has remixed the "code is law" meme. Nicely, unsurprisingly.

I've been experimenting with Apple's mail client, "Mail" (note to product development: generic names make it very hard to search on product specific information), and have been frustrated that an obvious function is not in Mail (or any other client I've seen).

The obvious function is the ability to define a hot key that will move a message to a specified folder. I had built (and had built) tools in Entourage to enable me to hit, say, ctrl+f, and the highlighted message(s) would be moved to the friends folder. I know you mice-on-the-brain sorts like to do that with the (insanely inefficient) drag function, but I like keys.

Anyway, I asked coder Jonathan Nathan whether he could help me out on this, and he put together a couple cool little Applescripts that get close. (He's GPL'd them here).

The hard coded version lets you code in the name of a folder. The variable gives you a list of folders to toggle through. Both require a keyboard utility to invoke the script. And both face a similar problem: Sometimes the utility will "forget" which message is highlighted so it forgets which message to highlight next.

Both problems come from the relatively immature stage of development that "Mail" is in. Interestingly, in MS Entourage you could invoke a script from the keyboard without a utility, and it had no problem remembering where it was on list of messages. (It's also relatively easy to find information about "Entourage" on the web.)

Thanks to Jonathan Nathan for his free (as in beer and as in speech) code. Any ideas to tweak it would be appreciated.

Using machines to coordinate sharing content -- that's what this site is doing. And what they are doing is totally legal. Yet if the machines actually copied the content they shared, what they are doing would be a felony (according to some in the content industry). Does this trigger make sense?

Jim Garrison writes to report the launch of a project that uses my three favorite things (THINGS): free software, Creative Commons licenses, and RDF. Gnomoradio.org will "create an online network where artists can promote and share their music freely and willingly." As its announcement explains, it is built on gpl'd software, and gives artists the ability to generate "an Internet address (a URL) that will point to information about the song, a machine-readable license, a method of verifying the downloaded song, a link to the artist's web site, and information about purchasing any available recordings of the song." More discussion.

Let free compete with controlled, and let's see who wins.

Thanks to Timo Hannay for pointing me to a reason to hope about WIPO. While he sees this as hypocrisy, I see it as a good news: regardless of its unwillingness to hold a meeting about the value of "open collaborative models for producing public goods," within WIPO itself, open source and free software lives.

Check out this story published online at Wired before in print about Amazon's amazing new searchable book archive. Amazingly cool.

This brilliant idea from MIT (using the cable network to distribute analog content, and thereby taking advantage of the existing analog blanket licenses covering music) has been in the works for some time. Note that most universities could take advantage of this, as most universities have a blanket license for music distributed on campus. So long as there's an analog link, at least. Or, alternatively, if Congress were to change the law so that digital had the same rights as analog, or perhaps, digital with an analog decay, then bingo, "piracy" at universities would disappear.

Joi writes about a song that Shannon has written for Ben and Mena. (lyrics) (mp3). Brilliantly done. Best of all, unlike "Happy Birthday," because this is under a Creative Commons license, you're free to sing it wherever you want.

Ed Lee was a key lawyer in the Eldred case, and is now a professor at Ohio State. Welcome to blogland, Ed.

Tim Berners-Lee's W3C has filed comments before the USPTO about the burdens of patents. Maybe the FTC's been reading USPTO briefings again?

There's a nice series here.

Julian Dibbell and I taught a class last term about the law in virtual worlds. The part that was most surprising to me was that none of the commercial ventures gave users rights over the content they created -- until now. Second Life by Linden Lab is not only an extraordinarily cool new virtual world. It is also the first commercial virtual world to make it explicit that users own the content they create. As this release describes, a revised TOS "allows subscribers to retain full intellectual property protection for the digital content they create, including characters, clothing, scripts, textures, objects and designs." And, if this wasn't cool enough, Second Life has also "committed to exploring technologies to make it easy for creators to license their content under Creative Commons licenses."

Creative Commons has had an iCommons project for sometime now. I guess now we'll have to begin the vCommons project.

So my brand is supposed to be pessimism, but I'll confess that since young Mr. Willem began to smile, it is becoming very hard for me to stick to brand. And now there is this news about Dave and Mark Pilgrim collaborating about standards. That is indeed wonderful news.

So I hate spam (and of course I don't mean the product by the Hormel company which has been cool enough to let the world use this word without launching a war against the use of its trademarked name), and I've been pushing bounties as one essential part of any real solution. Congress, the world is slowly coming to see, has no interest in a real solution -- at least after the marketers were finished them. But I am encouraged that Microsoft has launched a bounty campaign against virus makers. That's a much harder tracing to make, though they've offered lots more money than a spam bounty would require.

Meanwhile, this is a great story about a sort of vigilante
action against the most infamous of spammers. Bravo.

Reed Hundt, former chairman of the FCC, and force of good in many of the debates that live on these pages, has a great piece about the battle over Voice-over-IP in the FCC.

I've got a piece in Wired about the push to shift ownership of networks back to customers. It build on the work of Alan McAdams and the IEEE to accelerate broadband deployment in the US. For a great collection of papers related to this, see this . The Burlington, VT, story is told here. And the Utopia project in Salt Lake City is another great example of this.

Dave Winer spoke at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society's lunchtime series. The talk will be archived here soon. There was a great turn-out keen to learn from the master, and the master taught well -- mixing genuine and useful insight with an idealism that is too rare around here.

Law students begin life as idealists, and there's an obvious and powerful idealism in the Winer's arguments. I'll point to my favorite parts when the talk is posted. Meanwhile, I was happy to tell him that the Center will be copying his experiment at Harvard next fall, and offering a blog for every entering student in the law school. Turow's One L, or even Alex Wellen's Barman will be nothing in comparison.

Groklaw has a page devoted to SCO.

As everyone should know, one of the coolest things on the net is Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive, and in particular, his Way Back Machine. The Archive has been collecting copies of the Internet since 1996 (except for those parts excluded either expressly or through a robots.txt file). Using the Way Back Machine, you can see how a web page has changed over time.

As many have noted, the Way Back Machine helps correct one particularly Orwellian feature (bug) of the net -- that it has no memory. You can go back to a web page, and not know it has been changed. And recently, Brewster captured a particularly rich example of this airbrushing of digital code.

On May 1, 2003, the Whitehouse's Office of the Press Secretary released this press release, announcing "President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended." But then, with airbrush magic, now the same press release has been changed to this, which reports "President Bush Announces Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended." No update on the page, no indication of when the change occurred, indeed, no indication that any change occurred at all. Instead, there is robots.txt file disallowing all sorts of activities that might verify the government. (Why does any government agency believe it has the power to post a robots.txt file?)

Why would you need to check up on the Whitehouse, you might ask? Who would be so unAmerican as to doubt the veracity of the Press Office? Great question for these queered times. And if you obey the code of the robots.txt file, you'll never need to worry.

Ok, so here's a device that would be very cool. Net, please invent it.

90% of hotels with broadband have wired, not wireless, broadband. That means you must sit at the stupid desk and work when everyone knows, the best place to work is sitting in bed.

So here's what's needed: A device the size of a silver dollar with two ports. One you plug into your computer; the other into the broadband outlet. You configure your connection through the hotel broadband line, and then unplug your computer. The device is then a wireless bridge. Because it would only be broadcasting in the room, its power would be very low. But the key would be ease of configuration and size.

Does this exist?

So a friend writes, "so why isn't mail.app better integrated into iCal? Why isn't there a script to turn a message into a iCal event or task? There are two tries floating around out there, but nothing that works."

Good question.

More from Nathan: "ccRdf is a set of Python classes which (hopefully) allow developers to easily parse and manipulate Creative Commons licensing metadata."

Go to Dropload and drop a load of bites with an email address, and it sends an email to the recipient to come pick up the load. Free and free of the limitations of email servers.

I've already plugged EFF as a worthy target of support. Here's another easy and very worthy group: the folks at Wikipedia. As you (should) know, Wikipedia has built an extraordinary free content encyclopedia. They're now in real financial need. Please help if you can.

So months after wondering what this integrated "Rip, Mix, Burn" technology in OS X is all about, I finally got around to making a movie -- Mr. Willem's First Christmas. It was astonishingly easy to make. It took a couple hours of shooting with a Sony DV Cam, and then a couple hours editing. Sound directly integrates with iTunes. Photos directly integrate with iPhoto. And the result directly integrates with iDVD. All that's missing is a simple way to integrate Creative Commons licenses, the way, e.g., MT does, and Adobe will (as announced at our party, at which the latest cool Flash! was shown as well).

So after my parents saw the iMovie I made on the Mac, I was able to convince my Dad to return the Dell he had just bought my Mom, and buy an iMac instead. On Christmas, then, I went to the Apple Store site, and in 5 minutes was able to buy an iMac. On Saturday (two days later), the computer arrived.

The finalists for MoveOn.org's Bush in 30 Seconds ad contest are in. 1,000 entries. 15 amazing finalists.

Apple's latest, Garageband is a music editing tool. The tool offers some (royalty) free music, and the ability to publish the creativity you produce. CC-less, so far.

Dave points to a great "citizen-blogger." Perfect, but we need many more.

MoveOn's Bush-in-30-Second campaign has announced its winners. They are in four categories, and each is brilliantly done. I hope the same is done by the other side, when the Democrats finally find a candidate. Because what's great about this is that it marks the real beginning of iPolitics -- bottom-up media made real. Citizen-bloggers and digital media -- when Madison finally returns to "Madison Avenue."

I understand that RNC is confused about the nature of this campaign. No doubt the folks responsible for the RNC ghost-written letters to the editor were sure that there could only be a media effort if it was controlled and directed from the top, so that when 2 out of the thousand entries (not 2 out of the 15 finalists) mentioned Hitler, they thought that MoveOn must have sponsored that message. But now that that confusion has been cleared up, I hope they too will enlist the public to make the President's message clear. If they do, we've got the tools to help spread the messages far.

Yup. Just what you think it is. Check it out.

Bruce has a great piece at C|Net about security and privacy, building on his really great new book Beyond Fear (and bin-head-dom).

Tom Barger on the potential of a remix culture.

My blog server was down just at the moment I had a moment to begin to catch up on posts. But then zephoria reports on code that I knew had to exist but that I had not yet seen:

trying out ecto

Trying to post from Ecto to my blog. I love the idea of being able to blog offline and just upload.

What a great idea, bounties. Even found a virus maker. Imagine what they could do when applied to unsolicited packets of data that come with their own calling card (ie, spam).

Bruce Schneier's got a new op-ed on warrants as a security countermeasure. Very nice.

Not that one should expect that Apple reads blogs, but very cool idea in any case!

Cory's speech at Microsoft on the mistake of DRM. (PDF) (thanks Jeremie!)

Thanks to the American Museum of the Moving Image, Presidential campaign television commercials throughout history.

So the New York Times ran a magazine piece about Robert Greenwald's latest political documentary, OutFOXed. Stanford's CIS and the great folks at Fenwick & West have been advising Greenwald (pro bono) about how best to exercise his fair use rights in making this critique of FOX News.

This clip gives you a sense of the issues we faced. And so you'll see how relieved I was to read Dianna Brandi's (VP for legal affairs at FOX) comment in the Washington Post: "People steal our footage all the time.... We generally sort of look the other way."

I take it she's referring to the fair use by others of FOX's footage, and if so, then bravo FOX. Fair use, of course, is not stealing, even though lawyers who know better like to use that false description as often as they can. (But if she really means FOX footage is being stolen, then that's awful. Get better locks, Fox.)

I actually knew nothing about FOX News before working on this film -- not much time for network news, and I had only ever heard Bill O'Reilly once, on Fresh Air. And while I came to the project with low expectations about any news network, I was still astonished. As you'll see when you buy the DVD or host a MoveOn.org house party, there's a lot to be amazed at. The most powerful is an amazingly unFAIR and unBALANCED clip with Jeremy Glick and Bill O'Reilly. Not unlike (but much worse than) the exchange Georgetown Professor David Cole described. (Washington Post).

As the Times article describes, Greenwald's style for distributing documentaries may be the beginning of something new -- political criticism, using interviews and clips, making a strong political point, distributed through DVDs and political action groups. (See some other examples here). On what theory does he, and others, have the right to use such material without permission? On the free culture theory we call the First Amendment: Copyright law must, the Court told us in Eldred, embed "fair use"; "fair use" is informed by First Amendment values; the values of the First Amendment most relevant here are those expressed in New York Times v. Sullivan. As with news-gathering, critical political filmmaking needs a buffer zone of protection against the overreaching of the law. And if the potential of this medium -- now liberated by digital technology -- is to be realized, we need clear precedents that establish that critics have the freedom to criticize without having to hire a lawyer first.

Watch the movie. Celebrate the freedom it represents. It is a particularly American freedom that we should celebrate and practice more often.

So many reasons to love Amazon and Google, but here's another. Robert Greenwald's film, OutFOXed, has been out for a week. It is the #1 ranked DVD at Amazon, and the first relevant "Murdoch" on Google.

Siva's got a great piece in Salon on the INDUCE Act. Just remember, he was a guest blogger here first.

P2PCongress' plan to provide access to easy P2P distributed archives of Congressional hearings is both useful and a killer example of non-infringing use. Others?

Philadelphia is considering adding WiFi boxes to all street lights, making the whole city WiFi alive. What I like best about this idea is how the link to street lights suggests how we should think about this resource:

(1) Is it free? No, just as street lighting costs money, it will cost money to put Wifi boxes on street lighting.

(2) Is it free. Yes, like lighted streets, and air conditioned city hall, you won't have to pay to enjoy the resource.

(3) So it is free and not free: yes, as all great public resources are.

And as with all great public resources, this will benefit Philadelphia in ways we cannot begin to imagine. Let the city provide a platform, and watch the entrepreneurs find a million ways to make it valuable. Did anyone have any clue about all the ways the GPS would be used once Ronald Reagan set it free?

Here's a demo of San Francisco's implementation of Ranked Choice Voting -- permitting people to vote for their first choice in an election, but then allowing their preferences to count if the first choice loses. As many have observed, this would make it easier for people to vote for their first choice (e.g., a 3d party candidate certain to lose), without having that vote increase the likelihood that their third (or 100th) choice wins.

So I'm at the Tech Nation Summit, watching Dan Gillmor talk about real-time blogging.

EFF is hosting an event about e-voting. As they post:

BayFF Event - "E-voting and the Upcoming Election" on Tuesday, October 12 at 7pm: Come join EFF at the 111 Minna Gallery in downtown San Francisco to talk about e-voting and the upcoming election, as well as share food and drink and listen to live music by talented local artist Samantha. This event is free and open to the public, so be sure to invite your friends and colleagues!

More information here.

Jamie Boyle has a fantastic response to Richard Epstein's fantastic (not) attack on what he calls "open source".

Jamie's got a great new piece at the FT.

So there are very few things in my life that I am really proud of. Here's one. As some of you know, I've launched a campaign to recruit people to the blogging world. My nephew was a big victory. A talented writer-in-the-making I knew in high school was a second. And now, I am extremely pleased to report that Judge Richard Posner and Professor Gary Becker have decided to take a spin. Tomorrow is the launch of the Becker-Posner-Blog. Judge Posner was a guest blogger on my blog. (You can see the collection of his posts here.) In this way we, if not Congress, help promote the progress of science.

The Lessig Blog got a Bobs.

Ted Nelson has launched The Little TransQuoter. The idea, if broadly implemented, would have a profound effect on how we speak, especially (if extended) with video and audio. Let it spread.

So the most significant change in my technology-related life in the last year is the elimination of spam without a white-list technology. I used to use Mailblocks for my main account, but Marc Perkel convinced me to try his own Bayesian spam filter.

I'm on record saying such systems could never work. I was wrong. Marc's system is amazing. I get endless email. His system filters the mail into three boxes -- my inbox, a low probability box, and a high probability box. I have never found a mistake in the high probability box, so I no longer look at it. I very rarely find a mistake in the low probability box, so I scan it about once a week (maybe 1% error). And it is almost fun to get an error in my inbox, reminding me that there still is this problem of spam out there.

Anyway, I'm giving Marc's spam filter service to my family for Christmas (no, they don't read my blog). And I'd recommend it to anyone else out there looking for a gift (note, I don't have any financial interest in this). As Marc described to me:

I sell it as a service. I can do it several ways. If someone wants a single email address I can give them a something@marxmail.net account. $25/year. Or I can host their email domain for $95/year. Or I can be a front end spam filter where I clean it and pass it on to their existing email server $75/year.

You can reach him for at this MarxMail address.

So here's something cool that I'm happy to be able to announce. Five years ago, I published Code. It's time for an update. But rather than update in the old fashioned way, Basic Books has agreed to the following:

Beginning in February, we'll be posting Version 1 of Code to a Wiki. "Chapter Captains" will then supervise updates and corrections. Depending upon the progress, sometime near June, I will take the product and edit and rewrite it to produce Code, v2. The Wiki will stay live forever (under a Creative Commons license). The edited book will be published in the fall. I have donated my advance for Code, v2 to Creative Commons. All royalties beyond the advance will be donated as well.

At this point, we're collecting "Chapter Captain" (CCs, of course) volunteers. CCs should be expert in the subject of the chapter, and willing to work through the Wiki to produce an updated chapter. (Here's the table of contents.)

My aim is not to write a new book; my aim is to correct and update the existing book. But I'm eager for advice and expert direction. If you're interested in volunteering, email me at this address.

I am grateful to Basic Books to allow me to try this experiment. I worked very hard five years ago to learn enough to write Code. I'm extremely eager for the book to gain from the collective wisdom of at least part of the Net. No one can know whether this will work. But if if does, it could be very interesting.

Mr. Gates clarifies.

So I travel too much, and leaving my family is now driving me insane. (Last year, 186 nights in hotels). Today I experimented with making a presentation remotely. If you've seen me, and my presentations, this actually might be better than me being present -- all the action is on the screen.

The problem is technical. There's no good way to stream a wide range of content -- video, audio, slide presentations. And there's no simple way to remotely run a computer.

But the latter seems the simpler hack: I'd like to be able to send a CD of my presentation to a place I'm to speak at, and then remotely control advancing the slides. So, e.g., my voice could come over the internet, and control of a remote computer could come over the internet.

There are lots of expensive ways to do this. (e.g., Apple Remote). But is there a cheap, simple, cross-platform compatible way to do this? Again, I want a mouse like control I can operate here that advances my presentation there.

In a comment to my last post, Is there such a hack?, Andrew Ducker writes,

If you're going to be sending the presentation in advance and then synchronising it to your voice over the internet, why not shortcut the whole process and simply add your voice to the presentation. They can just watch/listen to the presentation and you can take questions "live" at the end. The other advantage there being that you can also allow people to download the presentations, giving you worldwide coverage!

Indeed, why don't I? Because it is insanely hard to do -- insanely, because it seems like such an obvious feature for, e.g., a PPT or Keynote presentation, but it just doesn't exist now (with any sort of reliability). You can record a narration, e.g., in a ppt presentation, but there's no guarantee that the narration will actually stay fixed with the slide advances. You can manually carve up a narration into individual MP3s that get attached to each slide, and fix the timing problem, but who has time for something like that? And though Keynote promised something like this, I've yet to see how it can be used to make a truly, stand-alone, presentation.

Flash seems the most obvious platform to do this in, but again, it took lots of work to get this to work. And while Keynote promises Flash export capability, the output is not the same as the input.

I've seen products that promise to convert ppt to Flash, but I've not seen one that gives you a source file that you can work with. But am I missing something? I'd give my right arm (though I am left handed) for a simple, automatic tool to produce stand-alone presentations, and I'd even commit to making every one of my presentations available for free one existed (which is incentive enough for some not to produce it perhaps), but so far, I've not found it. Has someone else?

I can't express adequately how grateful I am for the help in response to my two questions. I intend to tinker through the suggestions I can (I work in a Mac environment, so Windows-only solutions won't work for me), and report back on what I learn. I'm especially grateful to jb's suggestion: Sure, I'll make whatever I have available for people to work with however they want.

Meanwhile, give me some time to process this, and I'll report back what I learn. And again, thank you.

So in response to my request for a simple hack to enable me to advance a slide remotely, I got lots of great advice about installing VNC on whatever machine I wanted to do this on. That's a great suggestion, but a bit of overkill (and likely to create some suspicion with some network administrators), though it did show me how to make it easy to help my Mom on the Mac I bought for her (and why doesn't Apple sell a version of Apple Remote for kids helping parents learn how to use Macs?).

But what I was hoping for in a hack was something simpler than a system to take over all control of a machine. Murray suggests a Java solution, which seemed the right sort of solution. But Kevin Reynen of SidewalkTheory has written some scripts that get run through iChat. This is an elegant little solution to the problem -- just facilitating the advance of the slides and allowing the iChat to be used for the voice part at the same time -- and in exchange for my promising to give a talk to a class he's in (via remote), he's offered to make on for a Win platform as well. I've accepted, and I'll post that code too when it's done. But thanks to Kevin for giving me a real chance of more time with my kid.

The famous David Isenberg, author of The Rise of the Stupid Network, and early mentor of mine, is organizing a fantastic (I've seen his conferences before) and important (I know this issue well) conference, The Freedom to Connect. Registration fees increase on March 1, so reserve early and often.

Berklee College of Music and Berklee Press has now released The Future of Music by David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard. It is fantastically interesting.

So my post about David Isenberg brought this very interesting history of a group David was a part of at AT&T, but which I'd never seen described so extensively.

A cool new (or I think they're new) organization, outragedmoderates.org has posted a BitTorrent link of all the briefs filed in the Grokster case.

MSFT sues phishers.

The OECD has released a fantastic new report on "Digital Broadband Content." I saw a draft a while ago, but it was embargoed at the time, and then, delayed in its release by those who didn't like its very balanced message. Unlike those pressing the "US view," there's lots in this document that advances the debate quite well. Some bits I would disagree with, and other bits, quibble with, but this is precisely the stuff this debate needs.

One issue that the document frames nicely, but doesn't quite address: Notice the trade-off between (1) the way we choose to protect IP and (2) the kinds of creativity we encourage. (This is a point made well by Terry Fisher in his discussion of "semiotic democracy.")

If we INDUCE and support the "per copy" model of copyright, for all content, especially video and music, and if we supplement that protection strong DRM, we pollute the opportunity for remix culture to develop. That should force us to ask: is there a way to protect the legitimate IP interests of the copyright holders, without polluting remix culture?

MetaBrainz, a nonprofit foundation, was launched today to support the user maintained music database project MusicBrainz. Yet another reason for Joi to be in California.

Campus Progress has a report including some audio from the event I did (first time I've ever been embarrassed to use the word "gig") with Tweedy and Johnson at the NYPL.

So at 11,000 meters, on a Lufthansa A340, just over Godthab, I am posting this entry, using airplane wide WiFi. It is fantastic. Not terribly fast (about 300 kbs), and not terribly cheap ($30 for a 12 hour flight). But I guess this is the future: yet another space where IP runs.

So there's this pattern of maturity in a technology -- from proprietary to "open" -- as players in the industry resolve they can't bet their future on trusting one particular player. And so it is happening in the digital camera industry, as users and developers demand an OpenRAW standard.

The OECD "Working Party on the Information Economy" has gotten very good at being insightful about network issues. Their latest report about "Digital Broadband Content: The online computer and video gaming industry" is here.

Jesse Kriss has a fantastic visualization of the History of Sampling. Does it mean what I think it means? Is (above the board) sampling dying?

Princeton Professor Ed Felten has launched a book club review of Code, towards helping along its wiki rewrite.

I've been a fan of the OECD's "Working Party on the Information Economy" reports. Though I don't agree with everything they've said, they've been extraordinarily balanced and informative. This is the latest -- a report on "Digital Broadband Content: Music." It promises to be interesting and valuable weekend reading.

Michael Geist is a professor at University of Ottowa. He's certainly one the most prolific and effective advocates for all things good. Among the million things he does is write a weekly column for the Toronto Star. That writing, along with his other work, has angered those with whom he disagrees.

Of course, I know well what it's like to be, let's say, not liked. But I've been astonished by the means deployed by our friends in the North for dealing with people they don't like. So too have I been amazed at the rhetoric. Check out Michael's post, Groundhog Day to get a flavor. I guess this is as good a measure as any of effectiveness. Bravo, Michael.

openDemocracy, an independent online magainze for debate about global politics, has adopted CC licensing. From the press release: "Past contributors include Todd Gitlin, Mary Kaldor, Kofi Annan, Anne-Marie Slaughter, John le Carré, Ian McEwan, and Siva Vaidhyanathan."

JD Lasica's fantastic book, Darknet, has now been published. It is a wonderful collection of stories and analysis around new media issues. He says some nice things about me in the book (some at least) so I won't go on about it. But his publisher has allowed him to prime the reading with some mini-chapters.

There's a fascinating and important battle going on in Lafayette, LA. Citizens are pushing a referendum to permit the Lafayette Utility System to sell bonds to fund a project to "expand its existing fiber-optic network in Lafayette to everyone in the city." The move is being fought by the telcos -- who would rather bring much more expensive DSL and cable to everyone in the city. John St. Julien and Mike Stagg have been blogging the fight. There's a great website explaining it. And today they've announced the winners in the "Fiber Film Festival," a film contest run to explain the benefits of fiber.

The theorists, of course, who live life in theory-land, object. In theory-land, all this stuff should be provided by the market. In theory-land, the government should stay away. And I'm quite sure, in theory-land, there's lots of cheap, fast broadband available to everyone. Yet most of us don't live in theory-land. And some of those unlucky real world people living in Lafayette have a good shot at getting something that the rest of us real world sorts only dream about -- cheap, fast broadband access.

Good luck with the referendum, Lafayette. Your example might well bring the rest of us down from the clouds of theory-land.

Andy Kessler's got a great piece on the eco-politics of muni wifi.

From the Free Software Foundation, an opportunity to learn more about the GPL:

"The GPL is employed by tens of thousands of software projects aroundthe world, of which the Free Software Foundation's GNU system is a tiny fraction. The GNU system, when combined with Linus Torvalds'Linux---which has evolved into a flexible, highly-portable,industry-leading operating system kernel---along with Samba, MySQL, and other GPL'd programs, offers superior reliability and adaptability to Microsoft's operating systems, at nominal cost. GPL'd software runs on or is embedded in devices ranging from cellphones, PDAs and home networking appliances to mainframes and supercomputing clusters. Independent software developers around the world, as well as every large corporate IT buyer and seller, and a surprisingly large proportion of individual users, interact with the GPL."

- Richard Stallman, FSF President; and Eben Moglen, FSF General Counsel

Whether your business or its clients deal first-hand with free
software or not, it has become a part of the environment that is
impossible to ignore.

The nonprofit Free Software Foundation, in association with Columbia
Law School, is offering a one-day seminar on the GPL and Legal Aspects
of Free Software Development at Columbia Law School in New York City,
NY on Wednesday, September 28, 2005.

As the GPL continues to consolidate its position as the copyleft
license of choice, it becomes ever more important that lawyers,
executives, and engineers become knowledgeable of the license. The
Free Software Foundation will shortly be releasing a draft of GPLv3,
and is making available this legal seminar to help educate on the key
issues of software development and license compliance.

The seminar will be led by Daniel Ravicher, Senior Counsel to the FSF
and Executive Director of the Public Patent Foundation; Eben Moglen,
General Counsel to the FSF and Executive Director of the Software
Freedom Law Center; and David Turner, the FSF's lead GPL Compliance
Engineer.

The cost per person is $500 if you register before September 1, or
$600 if you register on or after September 1. Breakfast and lunch will
be provided. Further information about the course schedule, and
registration instructions, can be found here.

For attorneys, the seminar will almost certainly count for CLE credits
in the state of New York, and possibly other states as well. We are
awaiting final approval, and will announce the number of approved
credits when we get it.

Guest blogger Cass Sunstein was on NPR's Fresh Air (the one show I'd cheat to get on) about his new book, Radicals in Robes. He didn't want me to mention it, but I don't listen (to him; I listen to NPR).

UPDATE: Apparently, while Senator Hatch has had a chance to read Cass's book, Judge Robert's has not.

I'm about half-way through this new OECD report about scientific publishing. I don't believe it is out on the OECD site, so consider this an advance copy.

The name confused me at first, but only because of blind US-centrism. "OpenCongress" is a site for researchers studying "how methodologies derived from Free/Libre and Open Source Software [FLOSS] production can be deployed by those working in the area of art, visual culture and cultural production in general."

Try^d's first album is now up: title - Public Domain. Available through Opsound and on their site.

songs from the commons
on MondoGlobo.net

Lisa Rein, who helped us frame and get Creative Commons going, has launched series on "Songs from the Commons" -- this week on my favorite topic, copyright term.

Barbara van Schewick has a fantastic new paper about the economics of network neutrality. As she nicely demonstrates, there is a severe threat of discrimination without network neutrality regulation, and that discrimination will reduce application-level innovation. van Schewick's work is not funded by any of the special interests involved in this issue -- nor is it sponsored by the "independent" think tanks that are funded by the special interests involved in this issue.

Grab the pdf here.

So everyone is hotly contesting questions about Internet governance. I know lots are conflicted about this. But notice some good news from the Europeans: The European Statement to the United Nations explicitly mentions and defends the "end-to-end" principle.

(Thanks, Bernard!)

The University of Massachusetts launches Cyberweek Sunday. The discussion series is hosted by the Center for Information Technology and Dispute Resolution (odr.info), and covers a wide range of ethics and eLawyering topics.

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 ...

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.

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

(Thanks Mike!)

As I've mentioned before, I've been looking for a simple way to make presentations that link my slides with my voice. Leonard Lin did it originally with my OSCON speech in 2002. He even built a simple way to take timings from PowerPoint and include them in the import into Flash. But that proved too cumbersome for this sad soul to use, and so for four years, requests for copies of my talks have come in, but I've had no easy way to provide them.

I may, however, have made some progress. Phil Pickering suggested (comment 7) the idea at Doug Kaye's Blogarithms. I implemented it, using Keynote and iMovie, as follows:

(1) print the slides from Keynote so you can see what's coming
(2) export the slides as JPEGs
(3) import the slides into iMovie
(4) import the audio into iMovie
(5) using the bookmark function, listen to the audio, and bookmark where there is to be a slide change
(6) marking all the slides, extend their length to the maximum (30 seconds)
(7) then starting from the beginning, advance to the next bookmark; split the image (apple+T); delete the half to the right; and repeat to the end
(8) Export to mp4

Once I programmed the keystrokes, this turned out to be pretty easy. The first completed example is a talk I gave about whether Google Book Search is "fair use." Here's a torrent for the (large) mp4 file. The torrent is hosted by Prodigem. (Get your BitTorrent client here. As the BitTorrent beautifully puts it: "BitTorrent is a free speech tool.")

The only difficult part about this was listening to myself again (and again) as I built this. The bubbling inarticulateness in it terrifies me. But anyway, in the spirit of the experiment, here it is.

My hope is to put every presentation I've made, with audio and the source files, up for anyone to do with as they wish. That turns out to be harder than it should be. Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.

Meanwhile, here's my wishlist for technology to do this (Keynote developers -- please please please):

(1) The ideal would be a simple SMIL like technology that would make it trivial to synchronize audio and images
(2) It would produce a flash-like output that would be small (unlike the MPEG4 video I've produced). In principle, there's no reason it needs to be big, since there's just a smallish number of images and an audio file
(3) The tool would enable simple bookmarking of transition points
(4) It would then automatically map slides to those transition points
(5) It would allow me to dump the resulting presentation in any format (so, e.g., I don't have to watch it across the web)
(6) It would run on many platforms
(7) It would allow me to run the audio at a slow speed when indicating the bookmarks
(8) It would not require me to buy a huge new system to do it.

What's distinctive about my style, as you'll see, is that I have MANY slides. Some are just one or two words. Some are on the screen for just 1 or 2 seconds. Systems that imagine cutting up the audio and attaching it to the slides (i.e., PowerPoint) won't cut it. "

So the other thing I wanted to try with this presentation was bitTorrent distribution. As I said, I used Prodigem's hosted bitTorrent service. Prodigem seeds the file if there are not at least 3 other seeds out there.

In the first day, there was about 120445 MB of completed traffic. Prodigem had transmitted 908 MB. Thus, 99% of the cost of distributing this was born by the audience. (Thanks!)

Right now, more than 1600 copies have been distributed. There are about 90 peers open.

Thus the meaning of: BitTorrent is a free speech tool.

I've been a big fan of Second Life for a long time. Next Wednesday evening, I'll be visiting.

Leon Felipe Sanchez has produced smaller versions of my Google Book Search talk. He's got a (1) full, but light, a (2) small, and (3) and iPod Video version at his site. Thank you, Leon.

Some smart folks at Google have set up a group on Google Groups to do fact checking in the Google Book Search debate. Sign up and get your regular feed about the lies mistakes feeding this debate. Here's a snippet from the first post:

In December, novelist Susan Cheever, a member of the Authors Guild, published "Just Google 'thou shalt not steal,'" an article suggesting that there's some kind of official word limit, or percentage limit, to material you can copy in order for it to qualify as fair use. She writes:

"The Copyright Statute…includes a 'fair use' clause, so that a few lines or phrases of a writer's work can be used as illustration by someone else. ...The amount of words that constitute fair use varies according to court case. At present, it is 400 words. …Google cites 'fair use,' but it isn't using 400 words; it plans to digitize whole libraries and make them available piece by piece." (Emphasis added.)

Even this small quotation from Cheever's article fundamentally misstates copyright law and misleads readers about Google Book Search..

First, no such 400-word rule exists. Indeed, in some cases courts have ruled that copying and republishing the entire work is fair use. (You can read about one such court decision here.)

Second, Google does not show more than two or three sentences without the author's permission. And that's not all. If a copyright holder chooses not to participate in Google Book Search, not a single word from the book will appear in any searches.

My Senate Commerce Committee for the Net Neutrality hearing is here.

On the BBC's website. Nicely done, though now we need some non-"market socialists" too.

(Thanks Donat!)

Marybeth Peters, Register of Copyrights, on the latest extension to the copyright term: Watch here.

The Stanford Center for Internet and Society is hosting a conference, "Cultural Environmentalism at 10," on March 10/11 to reflect upon the decade since the publication of Jamie Boyle's fantastic book, Shamans, Software, and Spleens. While the topic of Jamie's book (IP policy) is something IP scholars had been talking about for ever, Jamie's book was one of the best to introduce these issues to a community beyond law scholars. (I first heard about the book at lunch a decade ago when Harvard's provost told me it was "one of the most important law books I had ever read."). The book, and the articles that followed it, gave birth to what we should call the "cultural environmentalism" movement -- the movement to think about IP policy as environmentalists think about pollution policy.

We designed this conference a bit differently from others. I asked a bunch of IP professors to give me their list of the top "young" IP scholars. I tabulated the votes, and asked the top four to write papers. They agreed. Their papers will be commented upon by leading IP scholars. Here's the list of presenters and commentators.

Here's the Center's announcement. If you can make it, be sure to reserve. There are already a large number who have RSVPd, so act soon.

Cultural Environmentalism at 10
March 11-12, 2006
Center for Internet and Society, Stanford Law School
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/conferences/cultural/

Ten years ago, Duke Law Professor Jamie Boyle suggested that the history of the environmental movement offered powerful theoretical and practical lessons to those who sought to recognize the importance of the public domain, and to expose the harms caused by a relentlessly maximalist program of intellectual property expansion.

On March 11-12, 2006, Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society will host a symposium to explore the development and expansion of the metaphor of "cultural environmentalism" over the course of ten busy years for intellectual property law. We've invited four scholars to present original papers on the topic, and a dozen intellectual property experts to comment and expand on their works.

Molly Van Houweling explores voluntary manipulation of intellectual property rights as a tool for cultural environmentalism. Susan Crawford extends Boyle's analysis to the age of networks. Rebecca Tushnet, looks at the ways in which the law's impulse to generalize complicates the project of cultural environmentalism, and Madhavi Sunder looks at how the metaphor affects traditional knowledge. Professor Boyle will also offer some remarks, as will Stanford Law School's Professor Lawrence Lessig.

The event is free, but registration is required. We look forward to seeing you.

This year's Freedom to Connect (F2C) conference (April 3&4, Washington DC) promises to be quite a show. The battle over network neutrality is coming to a head. And this conference, hosted by Pulvermedia and David Isenberg, will be a focal point in that debate. Details.

Mother Jones has an interesting fun facts about IP list. If there were a brand manager for IP, this would be more evidence of her failures.

OpenSPARC went live today with the RTL design code for the Niagara chip. The code is licensed under the GPLv2.

The band Beatnik Turtle has released an "Indie Band Survival Guide" (free, as in CC). They've also now practiced an important virtue. A fan complained that he had purchased BT music through the new Napster. But when he stopped paying, the music went away. BT has sent the fan a free album. A lesson taught well.

Follow the discussion at OpenBusiness.CC.

Claus Pedersen has completed research on the pattern of filesharing in Denmark. His conclusions are (1) the decline in record sales in Denmark is explained by many factors, and (2) the decline that there is is finansed almost in full by the wealthiest artists. What's particularly interesting about the study is that it uses data from the Nordic Copyright Bureau, which has a monopoly status in Denmark. That means the data are not estimates of sales declines, but actual sales. (Nordic records 99% of the market).

A summary of the paper was translated by Marie Elisabeth Pade Andersen. You can read it here. Claus now looking for support to get the full paper translated. If you've got an idea, email him at this address.

So I'm sitting at a hot Internet Cafe in Costa Rica, interrupting the month with the family, to follow Dave's lead in drawing attention to just how Edwards' gets the net. As Dave explains, former-Senator Edwards has begun distributing video using BitTorrent -- demonstrating the important value of this technology that has nothing to do with "piracy." Now if only he'd signal clearly the freedoms that run with his video...

(Thanks, Dave)

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?

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.

Check out webcitation.org -- a project run at the University of Toronto. The basic idea is to create a permanent URL for citations, so that when the Supreme Court, e.g., cites a webpage, there's a reliable way to get back to the webpage it cited. They do this by creating a reference URL, which then will refer back to an archive of the page created when the reference was created. E.g., I entered the URL for my blog ("http://lessig.org/blog"). It then created an archive URL "http://www.webcitation.org/5IlFymF33". Click on it and it should take you to an archive page for my blog.

Why, you might ask, would you ever want to substitute that long ugly URL for the short and spiffy http://lessig.org/blog? Well first, and most obviously if you've ever written something for publication, URLs are not always short and spiffy. Second, the point is to create an archive of a page at a particular moment.

A bunch of us have been talking about a service like this for sometime. One idea we had been talking about was a slight modification: Rather than a link that always took you to the archive, the link would first check whether the page referenced is still there unchanged. If so, it would give you that page; if not, it would take you to the archive. Difficulty with this is dynamic pages.

It would be fantastic if the consortium running this would keep a publicly accessible archive of the URLs they generate tied to the original URL -- so if the service goes bunk, there's a way to recover the original URL. And someone should write an app that could sit on a toolbar -- ArchiveMe -- and when clicked, generated the URL (and put it in the copy/paste field).

But these are quibbles: This is a very cool project, really really needed.

This, this weekend, here in Berlin. Hop a plane. Very cool event.

This Thursday, September 14 at 5PM (SL/Pacific), PopSci.com and Creative Commons will be hosting a concert in Second Life featuring Jonathan Coulton as well as popular Second Life musicians Melvin Took, Kourosh Eusebio, Etherian Kamaboko, and Slim Warrior. From Jonathan Coulton's blog:

I will be playing live from a secure, undisclosed location in the real world, but you will see my handsome avatar onstage at a venue called Menorca in the Second Life universe. You can also listen to the concert via a number of streaming type websites … The whole concert, audio and video, will be Creative Commons licensed, so feel free to record it.

More information is available on this wiki.

Recall Sun's decision to GPL the hardware-level design for its latest SPARC chips? Now here in Europe, there's a plant shipping silicon using the design. (Thanks, Jim!)

I am told by Allen that a very respectful AutoWeek executive called to apologize. The mistake was an intern's. They have reached an amicable settlement.

These guys are doing amazingly good stuff, and using a CC DevNat license to spread it freely within the developing world.

Buy tickets

Read about it here.

Mimi Ito is conducting a survey of AMV creators and their practices. Read more here.

Before the concert on Friday night, I'll be on stage at the NYPL with my boss (one of many), Chris Anderson. This is the second time I've read his book; I liked it the first time; it gets better each time. It should be an interesting event. Tickets here.

The Free Software Foundation has launched a public discussion on proposed changes to the Free Document License, a license designed "can be used for any textual work" but which, in the world enriched by Wikipedia, now attempts to license all creative work. I'll be studying the changes carefully, and will post my own comments, both here and there, but I really would encourage people to do the same. Please spread the word broadly.

This step continues the process the FSF launched with the GPLv3. And while that license has become increasingly controversial (see the Kernel Developers' post, the FSF's response, Linus Torvald's latest), there should be no controversy about the good work of FSF in running this licensing process so transparently. They've got very cool (GPLd) code enabling the public comments. We at CC are keen to get our hands on it (it's not yet distributed) to use in later revisions of our licenses. (We've done comments before, but the old fashioned way).

The real challenge here will be Richard Stallman's. His work helped launch important movements of freedom -- free software, most directly; free culture, through inspiration, and examples such as Wikipedia. It also helped launch a movement he's not happy about, the Open Source Software Movement. Much of the latter builds on the former. And these movements have been joined by many who share his values, some more, some less. (Again, see Torvalds). These movements have built much more than he, or any one person, could ever have done. So his challenge is whether he evolves these licenses in ways that fit his own views alone, recognizing those views deviate from many important parts of the movement he started. Or whether he evolves these licenses to support the communities they have enabled. This is not a choice of principle vs compromise. It is a choice about what principle should govern the guardians of these licenses.

I was struck as I've been thinking about this by an obvious analogy: At a recent launch of Creative Commons licenses in a Latin American country, an artist described what it was like to watch her work remixed on ccMixter. As she described, at first "it is mine"; then it becomes "less mine." When "less mine," it would be wrong, she suggested, for the artist to exercise the complete and personal control over the object as when it was just "mine."

E.g., we all (should) see why it's wrong for the Margaret Mitchell estate to threaten remixers of "Gone with the Wind" with lawsuits, that story having become so central to the culture of America, and especially the American south. Though I would certainly have supported her effort to sue a publisher who changed a final chapter when the book was first published. This difference in attitudes about ownership is, imho, all the difference in the world -- hardest for the artists, or "owners" as some people like to say, to recognize.

Yehuda Berlinger has a very clever remix of the U.S. IP Code -- rendering both copyright law and patent law in verse. Now only if it were better licensed, someone might add some melody...

Tim Wu and Stuart Sierra have built "Project Posner" -- a free database of all of Judge Posner's opinions. There isn't a federal judge I respect more, both as a judge and person, and while I clerked for him, I can claim credit for only one thing that he's done: The Posner-Becker Blog.

Slashdot picked up a great post by Broadband Reports about the "experts" who have banded together to oppose muni-wireless. The gaggle of concerned experts make their case on a page at the Reason Foundation. Broadband Reports makes the obvious and important point about self-interest (many of the signers have a stake in the outcome) and inconsistency (oppose regulation except for regulation that bans muni competition). My favorite part of the statement was this:

Rules governing Internet use and electronic commerce should result from private collective action, not government edict.

On the anti-muni-broadband movement, here's a piece I did for Wired, also available as a podcast.

Ok, that's not quite right, but here's the Japan Times story.

I may spend too much time thinking about this, but how is it one reverses the hatred of a people after war? WWII was no doubt very different. But interestingly, Germans talk about this a lot -- about the brilliance in the American strategy after the war to rebuild (what we weirdly call) "friendship" between the German and American people.

That strategy had a government component (2% of the GDP spent on the Marshall Plan) and a private component. The private component came largely through the delivery of "CARE Packages." As described on CARE's website, these packages were originally surplus food packs initially prepared to support a US invasion of Japan. Americans were invited to send these packages to victims of the War. Eventually, over 100,000,000 packages were sent by Americans over the next two decades, first in Europe, then throughout the world.

A German friend this afternoon was recounting this story to me -- he too is obsessed with how to reduce Iraqi anger. But the part he emphasized that I had missed originally was how significant it was to Germans to know that these packages were sent by ordinary Americans. It wasn't the government sending government aid; it was American volunteers taking time to personalize an act of giving.

CARE has given up the CARE Package. So too has it moved far from the individual-driven model of giving that marked its birth. But I wonder how current victims of war would react to a repeat of 1945-giving. A related idea has been taken up by a 10-year old from New Jersey. But what if every city in America selected sister cities throughout Afghanistan and Iraq, and individual volunteers from the US repeated what our parents and grandparents did 60 years ago?

Let's say you release a draft of a paper using PDF. But when people open the paper to read it, you'd like the PDF to check whether there's a more recent version available. If there is, you'd like it to indicate as much -- somewhere. Obviously, you could always include a link that says "For the most current version, go here." But is there a way to say, "A more recent version of this document is available here."?

Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals will visit Second Life on December 7th, from 6-8pm Second Life Time (PST). Read all about it here.

I was a law clerk for Judge Posner. It was the best job a lawyer could imagine. Unlike must judges, Posner writes his own opinions. That meant the job of a clerk was simply to argue -- and he invited, indeed insisted upon, strong and vigorous argument. (Once I sent him a letter very strongly criticizing a draft of a book he was writing. The next morning I had second thoughts about the tone of the letter. I wrote a letter to apologize. He wrote back immediately: Never apologize for strongly stating your case. "I'm surrounded by sycophants. I don't need that from you."

He is the most prolific person I know. He is the most influential lawyer of his time. His work in law and economics revolutionized the legal academy. His opinions as a judge are easily among the most influential in the federal judiciary. You may not agree with his politics (as I don't on many things). But don't let political correctness block the chance to "see" this extraordinary figure.

Most won't like the conclusions of the book he'll be discussing. But there are always many more interesting Posner channels. He's a big fan of The Matrix. And cats.

Were it not 3am my time when he is in Second Life, I'd be there too. Let me know how it goes.

From the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property:

Recommendation 4:Policy makers should adopt the principle that the term and scope of protection for IP rights should not be altered retrospectively.

Bravo. Now if only the British (and every) government could muster the courage to follow this advice.

Nick Carr on DRM:

No, DRM is about controlling the business model for selling online music. And if it looks like there won't be much additional sales growth through iTunes, then music companies are going to start selling unprotected MP3s. In an iPod world, they have little choice.

Unless, of course, Apple starts allowing other kinds of DRM-protected song files to play on iPods. But even that unlikely event might not matter much. It would seem that the best business strategy for record companies at this point is to open the floodgates for online music retailing, which would almost certainly bring a burst of innovation in packaging and pricing.

People are often very kind (at least to me) about my speeches. But the truly inspired rhetorician of our age is Eben Moglen. Here's a video of his keynote at the Plone conference in Seattle. The speech is transcribed here.

Wow. Post an entry Friday, spend a weekend with your family, and return Monday to a brilliantly populated Wiki -- with a matrix added.

I've followed up on some of the comments in the extended entry below.

One general point: Again, these "distinctions" are not; they describe continua, not categories. Maybe there should be a scale on each access -- from extreme RW to extreme RO, total "commercial" to total "sharing." I'll think about how best to tinker with that as I see more examples.

Thanks again for the examples -- and please feel free to add more.

I've been a long time supporter of SecondLife. Yesterday, they made me proud. SecondLife announced it will GPL its client software. And it committed itself to freeing the back-end as well.

How significant is SecondLife? Here's a really interesting empirical study by Tristan Louis about SecondLife activity.

EFF's Fred von Lohmann (the lawyer who won the Grokster case in the 9th Circuit) will be arguing EFF's first Wiki case on Tuesday in New York. Details:

Tuesday, Jan 16 2007
2pm, federal district court, eastern district of ny (brooklyn)
225 Cadman Plaza East
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Presses Universitaires de Lyon has made my Future of Ideas available online (for free) in French. It is also available in printed form (EU25 less freely).

You'll remember Roger Ailes' view of Robert Greenwald's film, Outfoxed. As reported in 2004, Ailes said:

Any news organization that doesn’t support our position on copyright is crazy. Next week, we could take a month’s worth of video from CNN International and do a documentary “Why does CNN hate America?” You wouldn’t even have to do the hatchet job Outfoxed was. You damn well could run it without editing. CNN International, Al-Jazeera and BBC are the same in how they report-mostly that America is wrong and bad. Everybody should stand up and say these people don’t have the right to take our product anymore. They don’t have a right to take a year’s worth of Dan Rather or Ted Koppel and edit it any way they want. It puts journalism at risk.

Well, it seems Fox has now gotten religion. According to this LA Times report, Sean Hannity will air excerpts that had been removed from ABC's controversial "Path to 9/11." The excerpts "depict then-national security advisor Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger refusing to approve a CIA request to attack Osama bin Laden" - an event Berger said never happened.

I can understand Fox's "fair use" argument — though of course its tougher with work that's not been published. But it's really good to see that Fox now understands the importance of "fair use."

As reported on BoingBoing: This is extraordinary. Watch it. Share it.

(Thanks, Neil!)

"Using detailed records of transfers of digital music files, we find that file sharing has had no statistically significant effect on purchases of the average album in our sample," the study reports. "Even our most negative point estimate implies that a one-standard-deviation increase in file sharing reduces an album's weekly sales by a mere 368 copies, an effect that is too small to be statistically distinguishable from zero."

Study here.

(Thanks, M.David!)

So these are taking longer than expected, and now I've added a topic I didn't originally flag (though in 1984-fashion, I've hidden this fact by simply changing the original blog entry).

The subject here is spectrum policy. The argument is that we deregulate spectrum. "Deregulate" not in the sense that we auction spectrum. Auctions require a gov't created property right; that's a form of spectrum regulation. "Deregulate" in the sense that we set off large swaths of spectrum for unlicensed use. Congress has made this impossible in the short term for any significant chunk of spectrum. But we do have an important opportunity to set free "white space."

The argument might be best introduced with the following hypothetical:

Imagine the government nationalized the hotdog market, and then sold to the highest bidder the "right to sell hotdogs" at in a particular place for a particular period of time. These rights -- the right to sell hotdogs -- could be structured to be a kind of property. The market would thus allocate them to the highest valued use. And the initial sale would raise lots of money for the federal treasury.

Are you in favor of that? And if not, then why are you in favor of spectrum auctions? "Because certain uses require regulation," you say. But then why not push towards uses that don't require regulation?

Download or stream the video here (27 minutes).

Watch it on Google video below:

My argument builds upon a point I made in a piece published in Cato's Regulation. You can download that piece here.

I couldn't resist a second round on Orphans. This one's very short (about 8 minutes). It was inspired by the comments/debate about the first Orphans post.

You can download/stream it here.

Or watch it at Google Video below.

Don't miss Congressman Doyle's comments about the artist, Girl Talk.

As reported at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, Shloss v. Estate of James Joyce has settled. As you can read in the settlement agreement, we got everything we were asking for, and more (the rights to republish the book). This is an important victory for a very strong soul, Carol Shloss, and for others in her field. I am grateful to our team for their hard work. (Contrary to some news reports, while I was instrumental in bringing this case and in setting its strategy, the settlement was effected by Anthony Falzone and David Olson.) (Press Release).

But this is only the first in what I expect will be a series of cases defending the rights of academics against improperly aggressive copyright holders. I hope this is the last case against this particular defendant. But we've already seen others that may prove as egregious as this. One important part of the mission of the "Fair Use Project" is to defend the rights of scholars and academics, drawing more clearly and practically the boundary that "fair use" is intended to defend in theory. Stay tuned.

Sony has launched its YouTube competitor - eyeVio. By default, uploads are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. You can read about it here. We in the CC community will be celebrating about it around the world tonight. Yesterday was IP Day (really, no joke). Today is Sony Day!

I've been a fan of dotSub for sometime. The site enables collaborative subtitling of video. So far, the subtitling is just different languages. Very cool would be subtitling as commentary (think Pop-up video). Watch a CC video, or the infamous "my pirate kid" video from ARTE.de:

The 10th Circuit decided our appeal in Golan v. Gonzales today. In a unanimous vote, the Court held that the "traditional contours of copyright protection" described in Eldred as the trigger for First Amendment review extend beyond the two "traditional First Amendment safeguards" mentioned by the Court in that case. It thus remanded the case to the District Court to evaluate section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (“URAA”) under the First Amendment, which removed material from the public domain.

This is a very big victory. The government had argued in this case, and in related cases, that the only First Amendment review of a copyright act possible was if Congress changed either fair use or erased the idea/expression dichotomy. We, by contrast, have argued consistently that in addition to those two, Eldred requires First Amendment review when Congress changes the "traditional contours of copyright protection." In Golan, the issue is a statute that removes work from the public domain. In a related case now on cert to the Supreme Court, Kahle v. Gonzales, the issue is Congress's change from an opt-in system of copyright to an opt-out system of copyright. That too, we have argued, is a change in a "traditional contour of copyright protection." Under the 10th Circuit's rule, it should merit 1st Amendment review as well.

I suspect this decision will weigh heavily in the Supreme Court's determination whether to grant review in the Kahle case. It also nicely demonstrates the wisdom in this part of the Eldred decision (don't get me started on the Progress Clause part of the decision...) The rule of Eldred, as interpreted by the 10th Circuit (and by us) is that Congress gets a presumption of First Amendment constitutionality when it legislates consistent with its tradition. But when it changes that tradition, its changes must be scrutinized under the First Amendment. This is an interesting constitutional argument -- echoing some of Justice Scalia's jurisprudence, as we argue in the cert petition. And it also makes a great deal of sense: practices unchanged for 200 years are less likely to raise First Amendment problems (but see ...); but whether or not immunity is justified for them, it is certainly not justified for practices that deviate from Congress' tradition.

The opinion by Judge Henry is well worth the read. The argument was one the best I have seen. All three judges knew the case cold. It is a measure of how good courts can be that they took such care to review this case.

Thanks to everyone on our team that made this possible. First the clients -- Lawrence Golan, the Richard Kapp Estate, S.A. Publishing, Symphony of the Canyons, Ron Hall and John McDonough (all of whom use and build upon material in the public domain; all of whom were negatively affected by Congress's removal of material from the public domain). But also and especially to the gaggle of fantastic lawyers who supported us in the case -- the Denver firm of Wheeler, Trigg, Kennedy, and Stanford CIS lawyers Chris Sprigman, Ed Lee, Jennifer Granick, David Olson, David Levine, Colette Vogel, Elizabeth Rader and Lauren Gelman (Tony Falzone came on afterwards).

An important advance in the life of the network happened today. Miro 1.0 was released. Think about the history of computing technology -- from the bottom of the stack up, the movement has been from proprietary to free. The hardware became a commodity, then the OS, then many apps. Miro represents the commodifying the content protocol layer. "It's a platform that benefits everyone by keeping online video open," the website promises. Here's my promise: it signals the movement of those seeking proprietary profits further up the stack. That's always a thing for innovation and growth.

Tom Bell is writing a book about (what's called) "intellectual property" in public. He calls it "intellectual privilege."

I here offer a third view of copyright. I largely agree with my friends on the left that copyright represents not so much a form of property as it does a policy device designed to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (as the Constitution puts it). I thus call copyright a form of intellectual privilege.

Like my friends on the right, however, I hold our common law rights in very high regard. Hence my complaint against copyright: it violates the rights we would otherwise enjoy at common law to peaceably enjoy the free use our throats, pens, and presses. That is not to say that copyright is per se unjustified. We can excuse facial violations of our common law rights, such as the takings effectuated by taxation or the restraints imposed by antitrust law, as the costs of obtaining a greater good. But it does mean that copyright qualifies, at best, as a necessary evil.

Watch and participate at his website.

The Stanford Center for Internet and Society is now in the early planning stages for a conference to be held April 18/19 about the idea of a CTO for the United States government. Obama of course suggested the idea in his tech program. But this conference has nothing to do with the Obama campaign.

My current thinking is to pick four policy areas, and get experts to reflect upon how a CTO might impact or advance policy interests within each area. The four I now plan are (1) privacy, (2) security, (3) transparency, and (4) efficiency. Then at the end of the day, experts in administrative law will reflect upon how best to architect the office of the CTO to achieve these objectives.

No doubt there will be lots of fun speculation about who the US CTO should be. My own view is that the person should be someone at least with experience as a CTO at a major organization. (I.e., s/he needs to be a credible techie.) S/he should also have a rich sense of policy.

I've set up a page on my wiki to invite suggestions for the planning of the conference. And if you'd like to be informed when final plans are made, send a note to uscto@pobox.com.

So as an iTunes subscriber to Wired Science, I'm a bit biased here. But you can get Wired Science for free tonight and next week -- last two episodes of this season -- on broadcast TV (PBS).

This is something to watch, as its potential to enable real integration is amazing: Apture.

TotalRecut has today launched a remix contest: "What is Remix Culture?" I'm a judge (as close as I'll ever get to that title, but now twice -- just finished judging the Obama in :30 contest). Cool prizes. Great question. Get busy.

Zittrain was on The Colbert Report.

So readers of this blather will know that I've long struggled to find useful software for capturing and making available presentations I make, and that I've whined often about the flaws in everything that's out there. (See, e.g. this.) I prepare my presentations in Keynote which (alone) provides the key functionality critical to how I present -- good preview of the next slide, almost perfect ability to integrate other media, almost never forgetting links to existing media). I was therefore very happy when Keynote promised the ability to sync narration to a presentation.

That happiness was short-lived, however, because except for short, media-bare presentations, I have never found the syncing function actually keeps synchronization. (Like selling a spreadsheet that can't multiply).

ProfCast was a hopeful bet, but it has never thought it necessary to enable the capturing of transitions, or media. And so for those of us who obsess about making that stuff useful (maybe uselessly, of course), ProfCast simply won't work.

SnapZPro was an almost perfect alternative, though for reasons similar to the complaint below, it is hard to use it when trying to capture an actual presentation (again, you've got to set up the screen capturing settings just before you record, which is awkward and awful when you're trying to launch a real presentation.)

But I'm now very hopeful utopia has been found. ScreenFlow is an elegant and powerful program that captures a presentation and synchronizes it flawlessly. It even has post-production editing built in. And while I've hit some flakiness with long presentations (I'm a lawyer, what do you expect?) with media (genuine flakiness -- weird screen colors, apparent freezes for minutes at a time), almost always it has recovered and allowed me to save the sync.

One extremely frustrating feature/bug with the program as it exists now is no simple way to link the launch of the program to the launch of a presentation. My flow is to get to a stage, and begin a presentation immediately. But ScreenFlow imagines I'll get to the stage, set the record preferences to capture the second screen (you can't set that preference until it actually sees the second screen), then launch the record, and then launch the presentation, and then when you're finished, exit the presentation and stop the recording. Twice now I've lost the recording because I've had to close the screen after the presentation and then when I tried to open it again, nothing was there. And even when it has worked, the steps to fire this up every time have been a huge hassle.

Simplest and most obvious changes to make this almost perfect bit of heaven perfect: (1) Let me tell you in advance what you should be capturing, trusting you'll see it when I start. (2) Give me a simple way to link the launch of the recording to the start of the presentation, and same with the end. (3) Give me a simple way to get to the scratch file if there's a failure.

Given the almost perfection of the system so far, I'm optimistic someone will get this right soon.

Matt Stoller at OpenLeft has been collecting positions from Democratic candidates about network neutrality. As he reports today, every single Democratic challenger supports open access. Check out the table, including contributions (or for most, the lack of contributions) to the candidates from telecom companies. And bravo for the work to make this dimension of this election clear.

My contribution to the "Free the Airwaves" campaign, a push to free spectrum "whitespaces."

Free Press (and others) alleged that Comcast was blocking the BitTorrent application. We've known for sometime the result in this case (because of the weird practice of the FCC to release the results of an order without necessarily releasing the order). But at the crack of dawn (California time) today, the Commission released its 34 page order.

It is fantastically well done. So much so that I felt compelled (in that weird lawyer like way) to blather my own 5 pages of thanks in a letter to the Commission that will be mailed today.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Send to five (Republicans not included).

I received this letter from the McCain/Palin campaign today in response to our call for them to support "open debates." Wonderfully progressive and right from these candidates on the Right.

If you've not become a reader of factcheck.org, you should. They work too hard, in my biased view, to present flaws on both sides. But that's a virtuous sin in such an organization. It's review of the VP debates is great.

res ipsa.

And note I talk about this blog in the book. If Three Blind Mice wants to out himself, I'd be happy to send him a copy.

At the bottom of the Remix page, you'll find the name of two souls whose help I'm grateful for. J. Christopher Garcia was the designer of the site, and M. David Peterson did the heavy lifting. Thank you to both.

TransparentDemocracy.org has gone beta. This very cool sites helps you sift through election recommendations as well as corporate ballot measures. The gist is this: you pick your recommenders, and you can see how they rank candidates or ballot measures. The site will eventually be a platform for any set of recommenders, so its aim is to become as general as possible. But especially for us California voters (with pages and pages of incomprehensible ballot measures) this will be an enormous help. In the extended entry below, I include an email from the creator of the site, Kim Cranston, explaining a bit more.

Harry McCracken has "25 Arguments for the Elimination of Copy Protection."

Julian Sanchez has a fantastic piece about the fabrication of a (still used today) statistic about the economic harm caused by "piracy."

As many have, I've been eager to understand the terms of the settlement in the AAP/Authors Guild v. Google case (Google Summary, Actual Settlement). After spending some time studying it, here are my thoughts. (4TR: I was not part of any of these settlement negotiations so all this was news to me).

IMHO, this is a good deal that could be the basis for something really fantastic. The Authors Guild and the American Association of Publishers have settled for terms that will assure greater access to these materials than would have been the case had Google prevailed. Under the agreement, 20% of any work not opting out will be available freely; full access can be purchased for a fee. That secures more access for this class of out-of-print but presumptively-under-copyright works than Google was initially proposing. And as this constitutes up to 75% of the books in the libraries to be scanned, that is hugely important and good. That's good news for Google, and the AAP/Authors Guild, and the public. (My favorable views about the AAP at least are not, of course, reciprocated.)

It is also good news that the settlement does not presume to answer the question about what "fair use" would have allowed. The AAP/AG are clear that they still don't agree with Google's views about "fair use." But this agreement gives the public (and authors) more than what "fair use" would have permitted. That leaves "fair use" as it is, and gives the spread of knowledge more that it would have had.

The hard issue here will be in the details (surprise, surprise). The agreement calls for the creation of a registry to be operated by a nonprofit corporation. That corporation will be governed by a board comprised of publishers and "authors" (meaning authors participating in the law suit). That corporation will administer the payments to authors and publishers that flow from the agreement. It will also administer a registry that will make it easier for works to be identified, and owners located.

The hard question for the registry is how far they will go to support the range of business models that authors and publishers might have. E.g., Yale Press "Books Unbound" and Bloomsbury Academic both have Creative Commons licensed authors. Will the registry enable that fact to be recognized? Indeed, though the comment was made by someone from the plaintiffs' side that it would be "perverse" for authors to choose free licensing, it is perfectly plausible that an author would choose to make his or her work available freely electronically, but contract with one commercial publisher to deal with selling the physical book, or licensing rights commercially. That, again, is the Bloomsbury Academic business model. Ideally, this non-profit should encourage the widest range of rights-respecting business models. One clear signal about what kind of organization this is will come from this.

But key to the good in the agreement is that we don't have to trust the nonprofit to do good here. Google has committed both to making the data it can control (not private data about telephone numbers and contact info, but public data about copyright registration, terms, etc.) nonexclusively available, and more importantly, downloadable by anyone who wants to build a competing and complementary database. It has also reserved important safe-harbors for its incredibly valuable public domain collection (which includes books people get free access to, and can download for free).

Here, too, however, there is an important challenge for Google. It has provided important value by making available works that have no rights attached to it. But it should do more to make available works that have some rights attached to it. Critical for evaluating whether the long term interest of Google is GOOd or GOOey, Google needs to build into its architecture assets that are licensed freely, or under noncommercial terms, to complement the assets that it claims are free for "noncommercial" download (namely, the public domain works it has). Acting to clearly support the non-proprietary movement as well as the proprietary is an important way for it to show that it stands in the middle, and that it, with the AAP/Authors Guild, have now done some real good.

The biggest loser in this whole battle is the Orphan Works legislation. If anyone needed evidence to demonstrate that it is WAY TOO EARLY for Congress to be passing massive new bureaucratic overlays to copyright to deal with the important problem of "orphan works," this is the evidence. Let's let this private alternative develop, while Congress puts away its billion-factor balancing tests for regulating access to "orphan works." For earlier rants against the Orphan Works bill, see:

Copyright Policy: Orphan Works Reform

Internet Law: 2.5 done (round II on Orphans)

And here's a video I did years ago against the original Orphan Works proposals.

And a video I did long ago about whether Google's use was "fair use."

So a new President means (the chance of a) new Chairman of the FCC. Before he passes, it is timely to begin to reflect a bit upon the chairmanship of the current chairman, Kevin Martin.

A clue that this is an interesting and important chairman is the fact that he's an equal opportunity anger-er -- the left has loved and hated him, the right has loved and hated him. I'm an increasingly strong admirer. His contribution to sensible thinking about infrastructures was established with his taking the lead in imposing network-neutrality-like rules on Comcast. But it is the unanimous decision freeing "white space" spectrum that will, I think, ultimately be the most important. The decision is not only right. It shows a liberation from a rigid and flawed understanding of the best way to maximize the economic value of "spectrum." This clear thinking needs to expand beyond these bands. But it is an important start.

Consistent with the values of any "open government," and with his strong leadership on "free debates" from the very start, the Obama team has modified the copyright notice on change.gov to embrace the freest CC license.

This is great news about a subject that's harder than it seems. One might well ask why is this an issue at all? The one thing copyright law is pretty good at is exempting works of the government from copyright protection. Why should the published work of a transition, or a President, be any different?

I don't think it should be, but I get why this is a hard issue. Whether or not one was free to republish works printed by the GPO, the freedom that digital technologies enables here is certainly enough to give one pause. I'm fine with the pause; I'd be happy to defend the freedom explicitly. But it is understandable that this is something that any administration would have to think through.

I'm glad the thought in this administration led to the right conclusion, so quickly, and in the midst of so much else going on.

As I indicated yesterday, I was very encouraged by the decision by the Obama transition team to freely license change.gov (not actually a .gov entity, so not exempt from the rights of copyright).

But over the weekend, a bunch of us got together to begin (actually, continue) the process of framing "open government principles." The first round is described at Politico by Ben Smith.

You can read the rationale for the principles at open-government.us. Put briefly, the three principles are:

1. No Legal Barrier to Sharing (law (copyright law) should not block sharing);

2. No Technological Barrier to Sharing (code (limitations on downloads, for example) should not block sharing;

3. Free competition (no alliances should favor one commercial entity over another, or commercial over noncommercial entities).

Some have framed these as "demands" made of the administration. That's like saying the mouse can make demands of the lion. We're not making demands; we're describing good policy. Or at least, good policy as we see it.

This is very cool functionality, building nicely on the free (culture) web.

I'm working on a presentation that could really use a Simpsons-esque like section. I emailed Matt Groening, but he didn't respond (no, I didn't really email Matt Groening). Anyway, if any of you are the next Matt Groening, and want to work on a short cartoon segment for a global warming/corruption related preso (all to be ccFree), email me at lessig at pobox dot com? It wouldn't be long, and it is easy to describe. Thanks in advance.

Update: Thanks for the responses so far. Two important clarifications -- I don't actually need a cartoon that looks like the Simpsons. I mean only something that could be used in the wonderfully ambiguous way that the Simpsons is used to be serious and not in the same spin. Also, the critical thing here is animation -- I need an animated cartoon to make the point I'm trying to make. Thanks again.

We're in the top 3, but there's still over a week of voting. Consider this carefully, and then register and vote.

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.

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 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).

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.

Identify your Creative Commons content to FairShare, a project of Attributor, and the service will track and report how content is being used on the web. The service is free and the technology (Attributor) is amazing. Watch (to understand or for those who want, to profit) free content spread.

Herein brews perhaps the first important battle of reform for this President. I have long thought the President should resign his membership in the Democratic Party -- not because he doesn't or shouldn't share the values of the Democratic Party, but because it is time we recognize we need a President above either partisanship (which got us the "Contract with America") or bipartisanship (which got us the Iraq War). But Hoyer's behavior here makes the point most starkly.

Earmarks are a cancer: Not because they consume a large part of the budget -- they don't; not because we shouldn't be spending money -- we should. But because they feed the system of corruption that is the way Washington works. They are the cornerstone of a system feeding the worst of the lobbying mafia (another plug here for So Damn Much Money), which itself is the cornerstone of K St. capitalism. It was a mistake for Obama not to join McCain in targeting them during the campaign. It is a fantastic thing that he is beginning to target them now.

Cancers can be benign or malignant. This cancer is malignant when it feeds K St. capitalism. It is benign when it is simply a locally informed direction to how the government's money (aka, the people's money) should be spent.

And apropo of the benign form of this cancer: I've agreed to help Congresswoman Jackie Speier with an experiment for earmark reform. (Decidedly and clearly progressive) Congresswoman Speier voted against the appropriations bill because of the earmarks in the bill. But as reported in the SF Chronicle:

Speier is now trying a novel experiment: She's put together a citizen's oversight panel to recommend projects for federal funding, chaired by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, a critic of earmarks, and including local elected, business and labor leaders. If the model works, she may offer legislation to expand it nationally.

The panel will meet in 3 or 4 public hearings over the next month of so to review earmark proposals. We will then report our recommendations back to her.

The citizen panel idea is completely Speier's. It is a brilliant idea with enormous potential. More on the potential soon.

Fred von Lohmann has a fantastic essay on the complexity in knowing whether the President's gift to the Queen violated the law.

Does anyone doubt it is time to begin a formal and serious discussion about how best to craft a copyright law for the 21st century? Does anyone think such a law should yield such ambiguity to such a simple question?

The good souls at the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan have come up with a fantastically suggestive way of seeing the relationships between "money and government." Here for example is contributions to the Senate by industry and sector. Here you can see contributions by entities that received TARP funding. Wonderful work that will feed lots of insight and reflection.

The above is about the conference described below:

PLAY MACHINIMA LAW

DATE: April 24-25, 2009
LOCATION: Stanford Law School

Register now at http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/playmachinima

Machinima.
...It has been hailed as the art form of the 21st century.
...It is redefining music videos.
...And reinventing the videogame.
...It might be the future of cinema.

But there's a catch: if you make machinima, you might be breaking the law.

Or are you?

Find out at Stanford University. "Play Machinima Law" from April 24-25, 2009. This two-day conference will cover key issues associated with player-generated, computer animated cinema that is based on 3D game and virtual world environments. Speakers include machinima artists/players, legal experts, commercial game developers, theorists, and more. Topics include: game art, game hacking, open source and "modding," player/consumer-driven innovation, cultural/technology studies, fan culture, legal and business issues, transgressive play, game preservation, and notions of collaborative co-creation drawn from virtual worlds and online games. Films will be shown throughout the conference, including: Douglas Grayeton's Molotov Alva and His Search for the Creator and Joshua Diltz' Mercy of the Sea.

Mich Kabay of Norwich University (VT) reports his class has just completed 3.5 weeks with CODE v2 in his Politics of Cyberspace course. As he writes,

the files in the LECTURES section include more than 100 specific questions for discussion and exams that they may find helpful in preparing their own courses.

You can download the entire set here.

Thanks for the work making my own more useful.

Some scholars have been arguing that the architecture of the internet, its embrace of openness as a design principle, might revolutionize science if we could apply the same principles there -- if we could break down the legal and technical barriers that prevent the efficient networking of state funded research and data. Imagine a scientific research process that worked as efficiently as the web does for buying shoes. Then imagine what economic growth a faster, leaner, and more open scientific research environment might generate.

James Boyle, What the information superhighways aren't built of, FT (April 17, 2009). (Not that the FT is the perfect architect of openness. You'll have to give away some personal information to read this wonderful essay. Don't worry. You can give it away "for free.")

Markus Weiland has compiled an interesting comparison of the different terms of service for video hosting sites. You can read the report here.

The world of American copyright scholars is very familiar with the poetic passage of Jefferson's, written in a letter:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

David Ellerman writes to point to an earlier version of the same point, this one penned by Augustine. As Augustine wrote:

The words I am uttering penetrate your senses, so that every hearer holds them, yet withholds them from no other. Not held, the words could not inform. Withheld, no other could share them. Though my talk is, admittedly, broken up into words and syllables, yet you do not take in this portion or that, as when picking at your food. All of you hear all of it, though each takes all individually. I have no worry that, by giving all to one, the others are deprived. I hope, instead, that everyone will consume everything; so that, denying no other ear or mind, you take all to yourselves, yet leave all to all others. But for individual failures of memory, everyone who came to hear what I say can take it all off, each on one's separate way.

Ellerman is a researcher who had worked for Stiglitz at the World Bank. Thanks to him, Augustine is the new Jefferson.

This is fabulously cool: iFixit has built a teardown platform. I've used the site many times to take apart Mac's I've needed to fix. But those instructions were iFixit prepared. They've now enabled anyone to build a teardown ("the act or process of disassembling") spec for any product. The site offers the structure and advice for building great teardowns. It then hosts and supports feedback. It is a fantastic example of a "hybrid," as REMIX defines the term -- and all submissions are CC-BY-NC-SA.