Technology Blog

I love examples where ontology is necessarily trumped by epistemology. The Richards case is one of those.

On Letterman, Richards says he’s not a racist. Is that possibly true?

Well sure. He’s a brilliant stream of consciousness comic. That requires constantly putting your head into the heads of the audience, and tweaking it. He blows his top, and then begins to watch himself and the scene through the eyes of the audience. He sees them see him and his targets — two African Americans. He then gives voice to what at least some in the audience are likely — he believes — to believe: all the racist stuff. And then he sees that no one would see him as expressing anything except his own ideas, and he’s trapped. He shuts down, and leaves the stage.

All possibly true. But totally impossible to credit. Even if true, no way for us to know it’s true. Look for examples like this. There are millions.

source: Is he a racist?

Check out this video titled, “Charles Nesson is Insane“. I dedicated my first book to Charlie. Each year I mean it even more.

source: This is going to be great: Harvard extension class

(But first, yes, I am so sorry about the aol-crap player. I posted the last post as I was rushing out, and didn’t realize the proprietary junk till I got home to show my wife on her computer. It is one of the very great things about the real video services out there — YouTube, etc. — that they embarrass the creaking 20th century giants (AOL, e.g.) by showing them that you can run a video service that any computer can run, without the insanely badly-coded platform specific proprietary stuff that marked video 1.0. )

Yesterday was a real transparent society day in my house.

My kid’s been sick, and was really wound up. So as a deal to get him to take his medicine, I promised him we’d look for Donald Duck on the web (yea, I know, but he loves Disney. And anyway, have you watched Bambi recently? No major media company could release content like that today. It’s brilliant: the single evil element in the film? Man. It would be FOX-ed out of existence were it released today.)

I had just shown my wife the Michael Richards clip. And my son and I then tripped on a Donald Duck video. It was 7 minutes of Donald Duck as a Nazi. Someone had uploaded to YouTube (god bless that company) an off the air recording of this war time Donald Duck cartoon that of course you could never buy today from the current copyright owners. Update: I was totally wrong (and unfairly so) about this. As pointed out in the comments, this cartoon is available here.

Then, before bed, I wandered a bit more through the Michael Richards story, and found this insane thread at CNN of comments by people about the Richards event. Unvarnished America, teaching me more about my country in 5 minutes than 40 hours of TV would ever teach anyone.

And then finally, the announcement by FOX that it was pulling the OJ Simpson book/show.

So add it up:

Elements of the 21st Century/Transparent Society: Richards tape, Donald Duck revealed, CNN thread — in each case, access to something that the 20th Century would have filtered out for appropriateness. My evidence for that?

Elements of the 20th Century/proprietary (in two senses of the word) society: FOX pulls the inappropriate OJ stuff.

I’m not pushing to one side or the other here. Just notice how these fit together.

source: More on the transparent society

There are few moments that crystallize as well just how the 21st Century could be different: Watch (if you have the stomach for it) Michael Richards, aka “Kramer” from “Seinfeld” lose it in a career-destroying way. It’s time to re-read David Brin’s fantastic book, The Transparent Society, for it has a salience today that would have been missed when it was published.

source: Welcome to the 21st Century, Kramer

From the comments in the previous post:

jh asks: “yep re opt in v opt out, but also now covers use/access v copy/distribute,also now covers resale of information where it didnt before, second hand books offline. now used against users of information, was more traditionally about competing publications. What are the contours specifically?”

A hard question, potentially, though I don’t think it would be much trouble in practice. The test is “traditional contours of copyright protection” and Eldred itself illuminated the test. There the Court found that Congress had always extended existing terms when it had extended future terms. That constituted a “traditional contour.” So too with these — Congress has made different judgments about scope over copyright’s history. I would think all these were continuous with those. In my view, the test is discontinuity about some significant aspect of copyright’s tradition. Difference in kind, not degree — though of course that line is not self-executing.

Paul Campbell notes: “The Appelants’ brief link failed - 404″

Yea, sorry, the briefing in this case is so old, that a bunch of links were broken (and a bunch of the facts were embarrassingly out of date: e.g., we reported with pride that there were 5,000,000 blogs online. I cringed when I read that. The number now is probably 10x that).

I’ve been a strong supporter of not breaking up the 9th Circuit, having been convinced by Judge Kozinski that it would be a mistake. But the experience of this argument has not confirmed that judgment for me. Our case was fully briefed in April, 2005. Argument was set 19 months later. And unlike the other courts I’ve seen, these judges seemed overwhelmed with work. In the 10th Circuit (and DC Circuit for that matter), it felt as if the court had all the time in the world to understand the case being argued, and to prepare for the argument. In the 9th, it felt as I’m sure it too often feels to my own students with me: sure, I’m hear to talk and listen, but it’s obvious to everyone that I’m overwhelmed. Early in the morning, lawyers lingered as the red light came on. By the end of the morning, “your time is up” came before the light turned red.

Here’s almost the final version of the opening brief. I don’t have the final version on my machine, but I’ll get the link fixed.

Also fixed over the weekend was the original site where people had submitted stories about how the orphan problem affected them. They are a great read. This was long before the copyright office’s own orphan work proceeding. My favorite are the (repeated) examples of people who can’t get old photos of loved ones copied, for memorials or funerals, because of the policy of Kinkos and others not to copy professional photos without clearance from the copyright owner — even if the photo is 50 years old.

Our point was that this “burden” created by the opt-out system was never considered by Congress, and burdens substantially more speech than necessary to advance the government’s legitimate aim. The latter point we could argue about. The former is undeniable — as the burden is only realized with the emergence of the Net, and all the changes in law we changes that predate the Net.

anon writes: “So … How did it go today? What kind of questions did the court ask?”

It’s not in my nature ever to feel happy about an argument, but the questions were interesting. The panel was Chief Judge Schroeder, Judge Farris (who famously had worked with the researchers to produce the evidence the Supreme Court relied upon in Brown v. Board of Education to show the harm segregation had caused), and Judge Rawlinson (who, because of a family emergency, appeared via video).

Judge Schroeder asked the questions. She seemed focused on understanding how this case was different from Eldred. My reaction to that question felt much like it feels to have someone say your children look the same — to you, they couldn’t be more different, but to others, of course they look the same.

As I tried to explain, the differences are two — both the substance of the statute challenged, and the rule under which it was challenged.

Substance: In Eldred, we challenged the extension of existing terms — a practice the Court found to be “traditional,” in the sense that Congress had always extended existing terms when extending future terms. That tradition meant, the Supreme Court held, we didn’t get any heightened review of the change. (It was, in other words, within “the traditional contours of copyright protection.”) If Congress had always done it, then no punk law professor was going to question it now.

In Kahle, we are challenging the shift from an opt-in to an opt-out copyright regime — perhaps the most fundamental change in the history of copyright law, not supported by a tradition, but instead a radical change from a 186 year old tradition.

Rule: Eldred was the first case to challenge a copyright statute on the basis of the First Amendment. We therefore had very little precedent to rely upon, and thus simply asserted that as a regulation of speech, any copyright statute must be tested under the First Amendment.

In Kahle, we actually had some precedent to rely upon: Eldred. As explained before, while the Court rejected our request that copyright laws generally be subject to ordinary First Amendment review, it also rejected the government’s request that they be deemed to be “categorically immune” from First Amendment scrutiny. Instead, the trigger for First Amendment review of a copyright statute is now, under Eldred, whether Congress has changed a “traditional contour of copyright protection.”

We argued the change from an opt-in to an opt-out regime was such a change — it is traditional (186 year old tradition), and if anything is a defining contour of copyright, this was. The government argued that the only traditional contours were the “traditional First Amendment safeguards” identified by the Court before — “fair use” and the “idea/expression” dichotomy.

The real problem with the government’s position — a point I really tried to make clear again and again — was that it was precisely the same position the DC Circuit had adopted in Eldred, and which the Supreme Court in Eldred explicitly rejected. Put differently, if the only “traditional contours of copyright protection” are the idea/expression dichotomy and “fair use,” then the Supreme Court’s rule in Eldred would be exactly the same as the DC Circuit’s rule in Eldred. And only problem with that interpretation is that the Eldred court explicitly said the DC Circuit’s rule was wrong: “We recognize that the D.C. Circuit spoke too broadly when it declared copyrights “categorically immune from challenges under the First Amendment.” 239 F.3d, at 375.” So if the DC Circuit “spoke too broadly” it is hard to understand how the Supreme Court’s rule could be the very same as the rule the Supreme Court rejected.

I do have one regret about the argument. That is that I didn’t have the chance to respond to the government’s criticism of our saying the District Court decided the question of whether the change from an opt-in to an opt-out regime was a change in a “traditional contour of copyright protection” on the basis of “intuition.” The District Court had held formalities were “mere formalities” and could never rise to the level of a change in a traditional contour.

The government suggested we were being disrespectful in referring to the judgment as grounded in intuition. But that’s precisely what it was based upon. She permitted us no opportunity to introduce evidence about the significance of the change. She decided the matter on a motion to dismiss.

I fear the same intuition is not limited to the lower courts. We were complaining about “orphan works” and the problem orphan works creates. It’s easy to imagine this is an isolated problem. But think, for example, about the Google Book Search case (or watch my preso about it here). Of the 18,000,000 books Google wanted to scan, 16% are in the public domain. 9% are in copyright and in print. And 75% are in copyright, but not in print. Now while that 75% is not technically “orphaned,” for purposes of the Google Book Search Project it is effectively orphaned. If Google must secure permission for the 75% even simply to enable search, the project is a bust. For because these books are out of print, it is practically impossible to track down the current owners of these copyrights.

Were the property system we call “copyright” more efficient — if you could easily know who owned what — then many of the problems the Internet creates (read: many of the opportunities the Internet creates) would be lessened. Or so we would try to demonstrate if ever a Court permitted us to offer evidence about the burden on speech of a 1976 regime in the 21st century.

We’ll see. I’m flying back to Berlin to return to my sabbatical, and to a sick boy. Willem hasn’t yet adjusted to the cold of beautiful Berlin, and no spouse should have to adjust to suffering a sick child alone.

source: Kahle v. Gonzales II

The 9th Circuit heard arguments today in our case Kahle v. Gonzales.

This case was filed after Eldred v. Ashcroft was decided. It is built upon the rule Eldred articulated.

If you remember, in Eldred, we raised a First Amendment challenge to Congress’ extension of existing copyright terms. Our argument was: “this is a regulation of speech; apply ordinary First Amendment review to the statute.”

The government argued the other extreme — no First Amendment review of a copyright statute. It argued the Court should affirm the DC Circuit’s rule that copyrights were “categorically immune from challenges under the First Amendment.”

The Court adopted neither position. It refused to apply ordinary First Amendment review to a copyright statute. But it also refused to exempt copyright statutes from First Amendment review. Instead, as the Court wrote:

To the extent such assertions [assertions where someone claims a right to “make other peoples’ speeches”] raise First Amendment concerns, copyright’s built-in free speech safeguards are generally adequate to address them. We recognize that the D.C. Circuit spoke too broadly when it declared copyrights “categorically immune from challenges under the First Amendment.” 239 F.3d, at 375. But when, as in this case, Congress has not altered the traditional contours of copyright protection, further First Amendment scrutiny is unnecessary.

This is a kind of tradition-triggered standard: So long as Congress stays within the “traditional contours of copyright protection,” then further First Amendment review is unnecessary. But if Congress changes a “traditional contour of copyright protection,” then the “built-in free speech safeguards” may not be sufficient.

We alleged a change in perhaps the most fundamental “traditional contour” of copyright protection — the shift from the opt-in system that copyright was from 1790=1976 to the opt-out system that copyright has become in the period since.

source: Kahle v. Gonzales

I hadn’t seen this piece when it came out in July. The Value of the Public Domain by Rufus Pollock is an excellent analysis of how one might quantify the value of the public domain. It nicely introduces what otherwise strikes many as counter intuitive. Highly recommended.

After reading Pollock’s piece, for example, it is much easier to see the fallacy in any public policy argument that tries to suggest there is an economic harm from failing to extend the term of an existing copyright. The key is the distinction between social value and individual value.

E.g., imagine a society that every year randomly selected 100 people, and sent them a check for $1m. The $100m needed to fund this program is raised each year by a tax on everyone within the society. Then some enterprising politician says: Hey, this is a waste of resources. Let’s stop this program. While it’s simple to see why such a change would be “Armageddon” for those in the $1m club, it would take lots of hand-waiving to argue (convincingly at least) that the change would be harmful to society.

Or remember how Macaulay (1841) put it (nicely reproduced in full by Eric Flint):

The principle of copyright is this. It is a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers. The tax is an exceedingly bad one; it is a tax on one of the most innocent and most salutary of human pleasures; and never let us forget, that a tax on innocent pleasures is a premium on vicious pleasures. I admit, however, the necessity of giving a bounty to genius and learning. In order to give such a bounty, I willingly submit even to this severe and burdensome tax. Nay, I am ready to increase the tax, if it can be shown that by so doing I should proportionally increase the bounty.

Me too. Absolutely. Taxes are awful, but necessary. Let’s have them where necessary, but only when necessary. And so why not have them to extend the term of an existing copyright? BECAUSE THIS IS A TAX THAT CANNOT “INCREASE THE BOUNTY.” The work is already produced. No matter what we do today, Elvis is not going to produce any more recordings in 1957. So it is a tax that benefits some plainly (those who get almost twice the term they originally bargained for), but benefits society not at all. I.e., a very bad tax.

source: The Value of the Public Domain

Josh Silver has a very disturbing post on The Huffington Post about this memo. If you click through, you’ll see a memo from ABC listing companies that want their ads pulled from any station that carries Air America content.

source: The cost of being Air America

So Nick Carr charges me with launching the Cultural Revolution, in a post dripping with references to the evils of communism, and with a triumphant close: “The Cultural Revolution is over. It ended before it even began, The victors are the counterrevolutionaries. And they have $1.65 billion to prove it.”

Wow.

The point of my Web 2.0 post is probably clearer to anyone who read my earlier post about the three economies of the Internet — commercial, sharing, and hybrid. As that post suggested, in my view, the really critical question for the Internet economy is how well companies negotiate the hybrid economy. In my view, those who follow Web 2.0 values are likely to profit most; those who don’t, won’t. Thus, when David Bowie tries to jump into the mashup/remix world by offering prizes for the best remix of his content, but demanding the rights to all the creativity produced by the remixers, he’s violating a Web 2.0 principle, and by doing so, weakening the extraordinary potential his effort could have. Put differently, sharecropping is no better a strategy for the virtual world than it was in the physical world.

Yet if you don’t see that there are different economies, then of course if follows that any effort to argue in favor of less control sounds just like communism. (Not technically, of course, because the control under all the communism we’ve seen was shifted to the state, it wasn’t eliminated. But this is a detail red-baiters often overlook). If there is just the commercial economy, then an argument in favor of exercising less control over content sounds just stupid — like arguing to GM that it should give every 5th car away for free.

But if you really don’t see that there are different economies, then I suggest you spend sometime reading the very best scholarship about what’s new about the Internet. Benkler, Weber, and von Hippel are my favorite examples; though not directly on point, much in Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail points in the same direction.

And if you don’t have time to read, then ask yourself a simple question: Is Jimmy Wales a communist? (Anyone who knows him knows how absurd the question is, but even if you don’t know him, you can figure it out.) There is no better, more effective advocate for the sharing economy. The project he’s helped steward — Wikipedia — is perhaps the sharing economy’s prize. But when he advises companies, and others trying to use the net, how best to build upon the value of the Internet, is he just doing Chairman Mao’s work?

I hope YouTube is an extraordinary success — much bigger than it has been so far. (Carr says YouTube is my “villain.” I must really be confused, because in the very same week, YouTube was my hero). It will be so, I believe, if it plays by the rules of the hybrid economy. A hybrid neither gives away everything, nor does it keep everything. And I’d suggest we’ll find that golden mean more quickly if we left the red-baiting to the 20th century.

source: Stuck in the 20th Century (or the latest to effectively call me a communist, while technically calling me a communalist

In Free Culture, chapter 9, I wrote the following:

In addition to the Internet Archive, Kahle has been constructing theTelevision Archive. Television, it turns out, is even more ephemeral than the Internet. While much of twentieth- century culture was constructed through television, only a tiny proportion of that culture is available for anyone to see today. Three hours of news are recorded each evening by Vanderbilt University - thanks to a specific exemption in the copyright law. That content is indexed, and is available to scholars for a very low fee. “But other than that, [television] is almost unavailable,” Kahle told me. “If you were Barbara Walters you could get access to [the archives], but if you are just a graduate student?”

As Kahle put it,”Do you remember when Dan Quayle was interacting with Murphy Brown? Remember that back and forth surreal experience of a politician interacting with a fictional television character? If you were a graduate student wanting to study that, and you wanted to get those original back and forth exchanges between the two, the 60 Minutes episode that came out after it … it would be almost impossible. … Those materials are almost unfindable. …”

Jeff Ubois has just published a paper about his effort to find out whether Brewster was right. His conclusion: Brewster’s right. As he writes:

I searched for footage of the Quayle/Brown interaction with an eye towards making some general assessments of the accessibility of historic broadcasts, and detailed the results in a paper called Finding Murphy Brown: How Accessible are Historic Television Broadcasts? It’s finally out this week in the peer reviewed Journal of Digital Information….

Copyright restrictions ultimately made it impossible to get the original Dan Quayle speech, or the Murphy Brown episodes in question. In an odd coda to this project, one digital library journal (from which I withdrew this paper) insisted that the correspondence detailing refusals by various organizations to allow access to or use of the Quayle/Brown footage was itself copyrighted, and therefore unsuitable for publication. Those excerpts are included in the current piece. It was disturbing how one effect of copyright law is to chill academic discussions of copyright law.

You can read the paper by linking from the blog entry.

(Thanks, Jeff!)

source: Can you find Murphy Brown engaging Dan Quayle?

So there’s an important distinction developing among “user generated content” sites — the distinction between sites that permit “true sharing” and those that permit only what I’ll call “fake sharing.”

A “true sharing” site doesn’t try to exercise ultimate control over the content it serves. It permits, in other words, content to move as users choose.

A “fake sharing” site, by contrast, gives you tools to make seem as if there’s sharing, but in fact, all the tools drive traffic and control back to a single site.

In this sense, YouTube is a fake sharing site, while Flickr, (parts of) Google, blip.tv, Revver and EyeSpot are true sharing sites.

Fake Sharing Sites

YouTube gives users very cool code to either “embed” content on other sites, or to effectively send links of content to other sites. But never does the system give users an easy way to actually get the content someone else has uploaded. Of course, many have begun building hacks to suck content off of the YouTube site. (On the Mac, I’ve used TubeSock to do that). But this functionality — critical to true sharing — is not built into the YouTube system.

True Sharing Sites

By contrast, ever other major Web 2.0 company does expressly enable true sharing.

• Flickr, for example, makes it simple to download Flickr images. (See, e.g., here.)
• blip.tv explicitly offers links to download various formats of the videos it shares. (See, e.g., here.)
• EyeSpot (a fantastic new site to enable web based remixing of video and audio) permits the download of the source and product files. (See, e.g., here.)
• Revver (the site that enables an ad-bug to be added to a video so the creator gets paid when each video is played) builds its whole business model on the idea that content can flow freely on the Net. (See, e.g., here.)
• And even Google increasingly enables access to the content it creates and collects. Its fantastic Book Search project enables people to download (funnily formatted) PDFs of public domain books. (I know this link used to work, but now that I’m in Germany, Google is obviously not permitting me access to the work because it is so insanely hard to know whether it is in the public domain anywhere else.) And I am told (though I’ve not yet seen how to do it), Google Videos can be download to a machine.

This difference, I suggest, in business models should be a focus of those keen to push the values of Web 2.0. Though Tim O’Reilly’s canonical statement of those values implies this freedom is necessary, it doesn’t really expressly say so. The freedom to access the content seems, in my view, related to the Web 2.0 principle that “the service automatically gets better the more people use it.” Or at least the right to access it if the author chooses (another Web 2.0 principle: Some Rights Reserved) seems essential for this ethic to make sense. As O’Reilly puts it, “Design for ‘hackability’ and ‘remixability’” — precisely what hoarding content doesn’t do.

If YouTube is a trend, this is a depressing turn. No doubt, that amazing company has a billion things to think through (including what to do with more than a billion dollars). But one thing it really needs to keep in focus is a very important part of its success: That it was seen to respect the ethics of the web. Why post on YouTube rather Google Video? At least some did so because YouTube was “cooler.” Whether it continues to be as cool depends critically on the values it practices.

UPDATE: Joi has a fantastically thoughtful followup on this.

source: The Ethics of Web 2.0: YouTube vs. Flickr, Revver, Eyespot, blip.tv, and even Google

FreeCulture.org (the student movement pushing free culture issues) ran a “Down With DRM” video contest. Winners are here. These are extremely clever.

source: Freeculture.org DRM Video Contest Winners

One of the most important conclusions that can be drawn from the work of Benkler, von Hippel, Weber (my review of both is here), and many others is that the Internet has reminded us that we live not just in one economy, but at least two. One economy is the traditional “commercial economy,” an economy regulated by the quid pro quo: I’ll do this (work, write, sing, etc.) in exchange for money. Another economy is (the names are many) the (a) amateur economy, (b) sharing economy, (c) social production economy, (d) noncommercial economy, or (e) p2p economy. This second economy (however you name it, I’m just going to call it the “second economy”) is the economy of Wikipedia, most FLOSS development, the work of amateur astronomers, etc. It has a different, more complicated logic too it than the commercial economy. If you tried to translate all interactions in this second economy into the frame of the commercial economy, you’d kill it.

Having now seen the extraordinary value of this second economy, I think most would agree we need to think lots about how best to encourage it — what techniques are needed to call it into life, how is it sustained, what makes it flourish. I don’t think anyone knows exactly how to do it well. Those living in real second economy communities (such as Wikipedia) have a good intuition about it.

But a second and also extremely difficult problem is how, or whether, the economies can be linked. Is there a way to cross over from the commercial to second economy? Is there a way to manage a hybrid economy — one that tries to manage this link.

The challenge of the hybrid economy is what Mozilla, RedHat, Second Life, MySpace are struggling with all the time. How can you continue to inspire the creative work of the second economy, while also expanding the value of the commercial economy? This is, in my view, a different challenge from the challenge of how you call this second economy into being, but obviously, they are related. But this challenge too is one I don’t think anyone yet understands fully.

As I watch Creative Commons develop, I’ve been encouraged by the experiments that try to find a way to preserve this second economy, while enabling links to the first. I wrote before about Yehuda Berlinger who had set IP law to verse. In that post, I nudged him to adopt a CC license. He did, but he did so in a very interesting way. As his site now reads:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. Attribution should include a live link to this blog post, whenever possible; text link otherwise. License for commercial usage also available from the owner.

This idea is one we’re experimenting with at CC — a NC license that explicitly includes a link to another site to enable commercial licensing. It is one way to preserve the separation of these separate spheres. I’d be eager to hear about other ways you might think better.

But the important point to recognize is that this effort to preserve the separation is fundamentally different from the effort of many in the “free software” or “free content” movement who want all “free” licenses to permit any sort of use, commercial or not. Imho, they are simply ignoring an important reality about the difference between these two economies. Indeed, they’re making the opposite mistake that many in the commercial world make: Just as many commercial rights holders believe every single use of creative work ought to be regulated by copyright (see, e.g., the push to force what are plainly “fair uses” of copyrighted work on YouTube to pay the copyright owners), so too these advocates of “free content” would push everyone to treat everything as if it is free of copyright regulation (effectively, if not technically). Second economy sorts believe differently — that some uses should be free, and others should be with permission.

It is because I have enormous respect for those who make the latter mistake (and believe their motives are more likely pure) that I urge them to consider the radical simplification of social life they insist we push on the world. I like the dynamics of the second economy. Benkler has given it a theory. I think we should be working to support it, not pretending that it is not there.

The obvious reply (and the real puzzle for me) is FLOSS. I said at the start it effectively operated in the second economy. But the “free content” movement that I’m skeptical of is simply trying to push the norms of FLOSS into the content space. How could it then be any different?

In my view, the difference comes from the difference in nature of the stuff. Some cultural production can be collaborative in exactly the way FLOSS is — Wikipedia. But you need an argument to get from some to all. No doubt, I too need an argument that some is different from some. I don’t have that yet. But it is here that I think the really important discussion needs to happen.

Oh, and by the way, Yehuda has added Trademark Law to his verses.

source: on the economies of culture

David Goodger has created this SVG. The source is available here. This image is licensed CC BY-NC-SA. Others at his site are in the public domain.

source: they say an SVG is worth a thousand words…

Like just about everybody, I’m a big Wikipedia fan. (Indeed, Code v2 is dedicated to the project.) And so I was extremely happy to read that Aaron Swartz is running for the board. Aaron was one of the early architects of CC. But his talent is much more than technical. He is a brilliantly independent and clear thinker; takes bullshit from no one; and has a deep and reflective view about all things Net. I’m sure this is true of more than one person, but he would make an outstanding addition to the board.

source: if I could vote on the Wikipedia board

OpenBusiness.cc has a blog entry about a film about “piracy” and its politics in Sweden, including a bit about the Swedish Pirate Party. Appropriately enough, you can download it for free.

source: “Steal This Film”

John Anderson sent me a link to a fantastic collection of political mashups. The current President is a popular target, but the Nixon stuff is really great as well.

source: Fantastic collection of political mashups

Check out the very cool finalists for the 2006 Wikimania awards.

source: Wikimania Awards: the soul of the free culture movement

The Stanford Center for Internet and Society’s Fair Use Project has filed a law suit against Stephen Joyce, who claims the right to control access to the papers and letters of James Joyce. The context of the suit is described well in this article appearing in the New Yorker by D. T. Max. The complaint in the case can be found here.

This is the first in what we expect will be a series of cases defending the boundaries of fair use. Stay tuned.

source: Shloss v. Joyce

Next Monday, June 12th, in Los Angeles, there’s another Google Print Debate, this time at the LA Public Library. Tickets are free but you must reserve them here.

source: Google Print — the debate redux