Lawrence Lessig's Blog, page 15

seeing relationships, seeing influence?

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.

Protesting the Authors Guild

On Tuesday, April 7, the National Federation of the Blind will protest in front of the Authors Guild headquarters, at 31 East 32nd Street, New York City. The protest criticizes the Authors Guild's bullying of Amazon to get them to shut of the Text-to-Speech functionality on the Kindle 2. The Authors Guild demands that blind people wanting this added and enabling technology must either submit to a burdensome special registration system and prove their disabilities or pay extra for the text-to-spe

highly recommended: Fred on the President's gift to the Queen

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?

from the there's-no-way-in-hell-you'll-win-that-one department

I am very happy and very very proud to report a big victory in Golan v. Holder. As you may recall, Golan was filed at the time Eldred v. Ashcroft was in the Supreme Court. The case challenged the URAA, which restored the copyright to works in the public domain. We lost in the district court, but then the CA10 reversed that decision, holding (for the first time ever) that the First Amendment restrained Congress when it changed the "traditional contours of copyright" beyond those explicitly mentio

CC @ 100m; C-C @ $1.1m & 1 year

So Creative Commons just passed 100,000,000 photos on Flickr.

Change Congress just passed $1,100,000 withheld from candidates in our strike4change campaign.

And a year ago, we launched Change Congress at an event hosted by the Sunlight Foundation in Washington, DC.

Celebrate CC by buying one of Joi's limited edition "FreeSouls" books.

Celebrate C-C by joining our strike. Or even better, by donating all the money in the world (b/c that's what this campaign stands against).

REMIX: buy the remix

So it may well have taken the makers of this amazing remix (and others available at Thru-You.com) more time to make this than it took me to write my book, REMIX. But whether or not it did, this is, to borrow the point from my friend David Post's fantastic book, Jefferson's Moose. Watch this, and you'll understand everything and more than what I try to explain in my book.

(Jefferson's Moose: Post's book is about Jefferson and about cyberspace. He's been toiling to understand both for almost 15 yea

BRAVO, Mr. President

President Obama "announced guidelines aimed at curbing the number of pet projects in appropriations bills" (aka, earmarks).

And again: the point: DEFINE: "Good Soul Corruption"

More people I admire missing the point (for which, as I've said again and again, I'm happy to take responsibility but which, again and again, begs clarification): this time, Ed Brayton.

Ed says:

Lessig is arguing that that the bill is bad policy and that Conyers is being paid off by the publishing industry to get the measure passed.

No. No. And again, Ed, no. To be "paid off by the publishing industry" is a crime. It's called bribery. To be given a campaign contribution in exchange for introducing

Karl: Missing the point

The usually exactly right Karl Lenz writes: "Is Lessig Shilling Against Open Access?" He laments the "damage done to the goodwill of the other side by this baseless smear."

This is missing the point, twice.

The merits of the "open access" argument stand or fall on their own. There was a fear of some (but discounted by others) that Conyers had introduced the bill to enable it to be swept into another bill without further process. Whatever else, given he has now defended the bill to remedy the same

CC Internships

Creative Commons are looking for a few good souls to intern this summer. Here's the link.