Lawrence Lessig's Blog, page 13

Jefferson's remix of Augustine's insight

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, to

law school created monopolies

To get into law school, most require you take the LSAT. That test is administered by LSAC, a nonprofit corporation established to administer the tests.

But to get copies of the old tests to prepare for the exam, a student has got to purchase the tests through a test prep company -- a company that sells test preparation courses.

According to Steve Schwartz of the LSAT Blog, LSAC receives $194 for each student who receives a full set of the exams. As Schwartz puts it, "[w:]hen LSAC has prep compani

video TOSs compared

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

Open Video Conference

New York, June 19-20, sponsored by the ISP at Yale Law School, and others.

a list of honor

In my work to push citizen funded elections (the hybrid between public funding (which is citizen funds) and small-donor contributions (citizen funding)), I have been astonished and deeply depressed by the number of very rich souls who in theory should support this change, but who resist it because, as I sense, they don't want to give up their own access to power.

These large Democratic Party contributors are different. They all signed a letter demanding the existing system be scrapped, and that c

from the enough-about-you department

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So a bit sheepishly (as I'm in this film and really fat) (and I mean fat, not phat), let me push a favorite film by Brett Gaylor, RIP: A Remix Manifesto. The film is fantastic. Gillis (aka, GirlTalk) is amazing. And the technical execution (of course, the substance was a given for me) is extraordinary. If nothing else, remix the film (which you can at Brett's OpenSourceCinema).

You can go to a screening, or host a screening, or buy a copy of this (CC-BY-NC) film on iTunes ($9.99), or pay whateve

Wikipedians: Please vote (by May 3)

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As I pleaded before, if you're a Wikipedian (and if you're not, you should be), and you've made more than 25 edits, then you are entitled to vote on whether Wikipedia should be relicensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (BY-SA).

If you are entitled, then please vote to make free culture interoperable. Voting ends May 3. That's like minutes from now.

Read more about it here. Vote here.

Creative Commons needs a coder

Creative Commons is hiring a software engineer after the amazing Asheesh Laroia is moving on to some very cool (and maybe secret so I won't say more) project out East. If you can code for good, we pay some. More information here.

REMIX now ccFree

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The Bloomsbury Academic Press version of REMIX is now Creative Commons licensed. You can download the book on the Bloomsbury Academic page.

update on Warner Music

As you may have read me tweet, the organization that hosted me for this talk:

Received a notice that Warner Music had objected to its being posted on copyright grounds. Apparently, YouTube's content-ID algorithm had found music in the video that they claimed ownership to. The organization is apparently responding by disputing the claim. I'll report back when I hear more.

Meanwhile, Keith Irwin (site) has kindly gone through the talk and identified all the music that is used in the talk. All of t