Lessig

In classic Declan style, a storm rages on Declan's list about a quote of mine that ran in the Economist. The article, Fighting the worms of mass destruction was about ways to deal with internet bads -- spam, viruses, worms, oh my! -- and it ranged across many viewpoints to describe a typically Economist view about how to deal with these bads.

Declan read the article and concluded from it that "Lessig wants to preserve freedom by ending anonymity" and so of course, his list, and my inbox, raged with the outrage at such a thought.

But what no one seems to have taken time to do is actually look at the article. For Declan's statement has no relation to anything the article actually says. Read on if you'd like the proof, but the bottom line yet again: Declan is a brilliant writer, and excellent pundit. But he is more a bomb thrower than a careful reader. His readers should keep this in mind.

So my mistake in life is that I answer email. Or I try to answer email -- however late. There are 400 emails in my to answer box, a bulge that began after the Eldred loss. And I'm committed to clearing the box by January 1.

All of which makes me particularly sensitive to email that I should not have to answer but which appears in my inbox because of the mistakes of others. E.g.:

A gaggle of angry emails continue this week based on Declan's claim that I "want to preserve freedom by ending anonymity." I pointed out that in fact, the article Declan quoted said nothing of the sort. I never called for "limiting anonymity" and the article never said I did. Though Declan found time to have a bunch of followups to his post, he hasn't had time to correct this error -- even though the author of the piece wrote to him to say that I had never said anything of the sort, and his article was not meant to suggest that I did.

I am surprised at Declan's silence here. When asked by one of his readers whether he would correct his post, he responded, "Are you high?" I guess I was high too, though perhaps he's a busy guy, and perhaps he'll get around to it someday. But meanwhile, enough of the anonymity flames, please. There are lots of things I have said to scream about. This was not one of them.

"This is either intellectual incompetence or intellectual dishonesty." So wrote Howard Rheingold about Adam Thierer's latest missive from Cato. I wouldn't call it "incompetence," given the custom of his community (DC). Nor, given the standards of his community, is it quite dishonesty. You are where you sleep, and Cato sleeps in the land of lobbyists.

In my last commentary on Darl McBride's musings about constitutional law, I did not address one issue that continues to echo in SCO's FUD. I didn't address it before because it is so absolutely absurd. But because it continues to bounce about in the nevernever land of SCO world, here's a couple paragraphs to make it absolutely plain just why the claim is crazy.

Apparently encouraged by the warm reception to his December letter, SCO Group CEO Darl McBride has now been writing letters to members of Congress. This is a template of a letter he is apparently distributing generally throughout Washington. Like his last letter, this one too has no relation to the truth. Indeed, it is even more extreme than the last.

Free free to try this at home:

(1) Read what Dean said about privacy here.

(2) Read what Declan said Dean said about privacy here.

Andy O's got a nice piece of reporting about this "reporting" at The Register.

I realized today just how angry I remain at Ralph Nader, former hero of mine, while listening to him on NPR today. Apparently, Mr. Nader is considering another run for president. When pressed quite effectively by Melissa Block to respond to the many many many who are begging him not to run, including the Nation, Mr. Nader responded that such a request was "censorship."

This man is truly outrageous. The only thing a Nader candidacy would do is increase the chance that Bush will be reelected. This man has become unsafe -- to himself, and to the nation. If he has friends, they should be his friend and stop him from this.

Which got me thinking: If you believe that but for Nader's not withdrawing in the last moments before the 2000 election, Bush would not have been elected (which is true), and you believe that a Bush presidency has caused great harm -- to the nation, to the environment, and to the families of soldiers lost in Iraq (which is also true), then which has been more harmful to society: The Corvair or its enemy?

And what would we say of a car company that released a Corvair again?

And oh, by the way, is it "censorship" to say you should not run, Mr. Nader? No, it is not. It is asking you to do what you have asked corporate America to do for your whole life -- take responsibility for the consequences of your actions. When I hear you explain why you did not cause the election of George Bush, you sound like a tobacco executive. And when you increase the risk of a second term for President Bush, you are behaving worse than an auto executive from the 1960s -- the harm will be the same, but at least profit is taxed.

Greetings. This is Siva Vaidhyanathan. You might remember me from such textual productions as Sivacracy.net, openDemocracy.net, and Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York University Press, 2001).

Professor Lessig has been kind enough to let me blog-sit for a few days this week as I commence my e-tour in support of my new book, The Anarchist in the Library, which appears today at a book store near you.

Ok. Check back soon for my take on the Future of Music Coalition policy summit that went down Sunday and Monday in Washington, DC.

So according to the governor, you can't make a parody doll of him. His rights of publicity trump any public right to parody. Amazing.

"It's extremely difficult to govern when you control all three branches of government." John Feehery, spokesman for House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Washington Post, 5/23/04.

And when did political parties begin to claim "control" of the Judicial Branch? Someone should inform the Justices. I don't think they've been told yet.

So jump over here to Amazon.com where you can purchase an electronic version of the Constitution, fitted very nicely to a Microsoft Reader (not Mac compatible), and protected quite completely with DRM. The description says you're not permitted to print it. The reader reviews report you're permitted to print it twice a year. And don't try to hack the code to print it more than twice -- until Boucher's H.R. 107 passes at least. (Though the ranking is higher than for my book. Maybe free fails after all?) (Thanks Paul!)

So here's how this week's topics connect. In response to the Balkanization point, people in commentary have been writing on the need for a better way to overcome language barriers. As Jeff Licquia put it: "One word: Esperanto."

Believe it or not, the P2P VoIP program Skype happens to offer Esperanto as a language choice.

Skype lets you search for other Esperanto speakers. Do so and you will find listed none other than the great Chris Libertelli, senior legal advisor to Michael Powell.

Result: You can use P2P VoIP to speak to the FCC in esperanto about its approach to digital audio. Isn't technology wonderful?

Are certain members of the federal judiciary actually highly intelligent robots?

redbaiting by the oblivious: Ed Rothstein of the New York Times.

So the Gore movie will at least give lots of good and appropriate work to bloggers, as lots try to spin the story told by Gore. My favorite so far are two ads released by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. (Both are here.) The first is totally empty and hilarious, with the slogan (and who could make this up): CO2: They call it pollution. We call it life.

The second has more substance, charging the biased media with not reporting the fact that there were scientific studies showing that the ice caps were in fact thickening, not thinning. That claim has incited a strong rebuke from the scientist quoted in the ad:

"These television ads are a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming debate," Davis said. "They are selectively using only parts of my previous research to support their claims. They are not telling the entire story to the public."

CEI: They call it truth. Scientists call it lies.

From to

Regarding this article in the New York Times about Congressman Goode's letter to his constituents condemning America's first Muslim Congressman's decision to swear his oath on the Koran:

Congressman Goode: The Constitution which you studied as a law student at Virginia, and swore to defend as a member of the "105th, the 106th, the 107th, 108th and the 109th Congress" says this:

"but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States" (Article VI, section 3)

Does your oath to the Constitution not include this section? Or do you simply not take the oath you took seriously?

At the Stanford "Legal Futures" conference last weekend, I joined a panel with author Andrew Keen titled "The Future of Professional Media." I hadn't planned to be on a panel with Andrew, but the conference had a FOO structure, and when I left the night before, he was the only one on the panel. Being a good host, I signed up so he wouldn't be alone (smile...).

As I've written here before, I've always been unsure about whether Keen is a know-nothing, or the greatest self-parodist of our time. For while his book, The Cult of the Amateur, is a tirade against "amateur culture" -- ridiculing its sloppiness, errors, and lack of standards -- the book itself is riddled with sloppy, basic errors that betray either an oblivious author or a publisher without standards. And thus the self-parody: demonstrating "professional" media can be as bad as the bad of the "amateur" media.

People who knew Keen, however, told me my self-parody theory was bunk. That Keen wasn't a brilliant anything; that his book was simply sloppy. Yet his latest missive again makes me wonder -- are we all just missing the extraordinary comic genius in this failed Internet entrepreneur?

Here's the clue: My criticism of Keen's book Saturday tracked the criticism above. I read a series of quotes from the book to support my claim that the book was full of simple, basic errors. Among the passages I quoted was this:

In a twisted kind of Alice in Wonderland, down-the-rabbit-hole logic, Silicon Valley visionaries such as Stanford law professor and Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig and cyberpunk William Gibson laud the appropriation of intellectual property.

I asked Keen if he had ever read anything I had written. He said he had. I asked him to name one instance where I had ever "laud[ed] the appropriation of intellectual property." He sat silently. I pressed. He had no answer. He could name no instance of my "laud[ing] the appropriation of intellectual property" because that's not my schtick. Indeed, as I repeatedly insisted in Free Culture (see pages 10, 18, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 139, 255), what others call "piracy" I was emphatically not writing to defend. Indeed, I criticized it as "wrong."

Now whether mine is a sensible view or not, or a view consistent with the Free Culture Movement or not, is an argument had on this page many times. But the Keen-relevant point is that my claim was a claim about a fact. He alleges I "laud the appropriation of intellectual property." I claim I do not. That's a true/false claim. And so in the tradition of the professional truth-seeker, so threatened, Keen believes, by the wisdom-of-the-crowds Internet, one would think that the disagreement would be resolved by someone actually reading something, or at least providing some citation. No doubt it was unfair to call Keen out on stage. He didn't come with his notes. Why would I expect him to be able to identify anything in my work at all? But after the conference, perhaps. Maybe then Keen could defend the assertion that I flatly denied.

And indeed, he now has -- but the interesting (self-parody point) is how.

In a blog post, Keen again charges me with lauding the appropriation of intellectual property. But what's the source for his renewed charge? Did Keen go back to the books? Or back to his notes? Does he offer a quote, or a passage to exemplify this defining feature of my work?

No. The truth of this matter for Keen is resolved by asking a bunch of people at the conference whether in fact I "laud the appropriation of intellectual property." They said I did. And that resolves it for Keen.

That's right: the truth comes from the wisdom of the crowd. These unnamed sources confirm it for Keen. And that's all the confirmation he needs. No need to actually read anything. The crowds have spoken. And now this "professional" trusts the crowds.

I have no doubt that many believe I "laud the appropriation of intellectual property." That's in part because people like Keen say I do, and on balance because most people (sensibly) have better things to do than to struggle through the turgid prose of an academic.

But the relevant point here is this: any author who aspired to the high standards that Keen is so keen to laud would suss the truth of this matter the old fashioned way -- by reading a book (or two). Were Keen to do that, he'd see that most of the wry humor in his blog post misses the mark because I don't in fact hold the views that he holds me up to (I have nothing against professional media content; I love Hollywood movies; and I have never doubted the significance of professional media: my praise of amateurs is not a criticism of the professional). What his writing instead demonstrates is something only the most cynical would believe -- that the aim of this "professional" writer (and his publisher) has little to do with the truth, much more to do with selling books.

Good luck in that, Andrew.

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