Lawrence Lessig's Blog, page 14

United carbon offset disappointment

I'm a big believer in carbon offsets (not so much the cap and trade game, but in the simple internalize-your-externality-sort). I talk about it in my Green Culture talk. IMHO, we all have an ethical obligation to offset our carbon footprint -- now. My wife and I have been doing so for a couple years. We're a couple months late buying credits for last year.

One reason we're late (other than the obvious) is the insane complexity in calculating it well. I travel way too much. That's the biggest chun

Fiction as policy in the New York Times (the book version)

Looks like novelist Mark Helprin is back. You might remember that in 1997, Helprin published an oped in the New York Times praising, as Peter Jaszi put it, perpetual copyright terms "on the installment plan." (Helprin insists he doesn't support perpetual terms; he just likes extending terms now to assure that grandchildren get the benefit of an authors work.) At the time, I invited the lessig-wiki community to pen a response. And amazing even to me, an extraordinary response they penned.

NPR ret

Architects of Openness

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 re

Using CODE v2

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.

Reason.tv on Jefferson's Moose

More on David Post's fantastic book, In Search of Jefferson's Moose, here's an interview on Reason.tv

the brilliance of Colbert; the corruption of Congress

A brilliant piece about the absurdity of payday-loan-gate. More good soul corruption destroying the way Congress works. Yet another reason to JUST SAY NO to any candidate for Congress who doesn't commit to citizen funded elections: Join our strike.

my vote for a webby: opensecrets.org

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The amazing folks at the Center for Responsive Politics' opensecrets.org have released (under a Creative Commons license) 200 million records to help the world understand how influence in Washington works. This is enormously good news.

Even better is that today they were nominated for a Webby. Here's where you can vote to thank them in the best possible way.

the voting has begun -- and if you're in the wikipedia world, please participate

I can't begin to describe how rewarding it is to see the voting start on the question whether WIkipedia should exercise an option granted to it by the Free Software Foundation to relicense Wikipedia under the CC-BY-SA license. I am very hopeful the community will choose to exercise that option.

This is an issue that has been close to my heart for years now. I have been pushing the idea of license interoperability explicitly since about September, 2005. The argument is a simple one: We need a guar

Just Say No (in a simple link)

The donor strike continues at Change Congress (no money to any representative who doesn't commit to citizen funded elections).

Here's a simple (and it's FREE!) link to send back to anyone asking you for money:

http://change-congress/no

Share freely.

From Stanford's Center for Internet & Society

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 A