You are hereFeed Roundup / Sources / Lessig's Blog
Lessig's Blog
there's still time to order...
6 December, 2008 - 01:17xkcd's (brilliant) work is licensed under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial license.
Categories: The Essentials
maybe the best cc-licensed video yet
4 December, 2008 - 22:55
Mizuka and Joi's Wedding from Joichi Ito on Vimeo.
Categories: The Essentials
Please come: REMIX: Reading
4 December, 2008 - 05:16The toughest gig when releasing a book is bookstore events. At least when you're no one, no one is ever there. So if ANYONE here is near the Barnes & Noble in Hillsdale (here's a map) Thursday at 7pm, can you please please please come? Or send your Mom? Or younger brother? Or younger brother's math class?
And if you can't do that, but have read the book, then can you at least write a review of the book at Amazon? Two people have written. One decent enough (though he didn't like the book). The second who gave the book one star because he didn't like me on Charlie Rose (I kid you not.)
Categories: The Essentials
Shame on CNN
4 December, 2008 - 00:52Embedded video from CNN Video
This story is absurd. The message here is that Governor Rendell somehow screwed up because he said something not intended for broadcast near an open mic. But wait a minute: Who did the wrong here? It is plain from the context that Rendell did not intend his comments for public consumption. Yet intentionally or not, ever-more-invasive technologies captured what he said. So why isn't the outrageous behavior here broadcasting what he plainly intended to be a private conversation, rather than, as this commentator makes it seem, the fact that he was having a private conversation at the mic?
Or again: To be sure, Rendell would be wise to remember that there are a million privacy invading technologies surrounding us, and that he, like a citizen in the former Soviet Republic, needs to make sure that whatever he says isn't been snooped. But whether Rendell was wise or not (and I certainly have criticized him for not being wise), why isn't the outrageous behavior taking what he plainly didn't intend to be public and broadcasting it on a world-wide network?
Just because you can see, doesn't mean you should look. And just because you looked, doesn't mean you should broadcast what you saw to the whole world. I know a little titillation is good for ratings; I hadn't known CNN had begun to stoop to such lows.
Categories: The Essentials
HELP: Please take the CC "noncommercial" survey
3 December, 2008 - 21:38From the Creative Commons blog: As previously announced, we’re running a questionnaire on understanding “NonCommercial” use. The questionnaire runs through December 7. It takes 15-25 minutes to complete.
Click here to start the questionnaire.
Your input is greatly appreciated. CC CEO Joi Ito explains:
“The study has direct relevance to Creative Commons’ mission of providing free, flexible copyright licenses that are easy to understand and simple to use,” said Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito. “The NC term is a popular option for creators choosing a Creative Commons license, and that tells us the term meets a need. However, as exponentially increasing numbers of works are made available under CC licenses, we want to provide additional information for creators about the contexts in which the NC term may further or impede their intentions with respect to the works they choose to share, and we want to make sure that users clearly understand those intentions. We expect the study findings will help us do a better job of explaining the licenses and to improve them, where possible. We also hope the findings, which will be made publicly available, will contribute to better understanding of some of the complexities of digital distribution of content.”
You can also help by sending your friends and colleagues to the questionnaire.
Categories: The Essentials
Open Transition Principles
2 December, 2008 - 22:00
As I indicated yesterday, I was very encouraged by the decision by the Obama transition team to freely license change.gov (not actually a .gov entity, so not exempt from the rights of copyright).
But over the weekend, a bunch of us got together to begin (actually, continue) the process of framing "open government principles." The first round is described at Politico by Ben Smith.
You can read the rationale for the principles at open-government.us. Put briefly, the three principles are: 1. No Legal Barrier to Sharing (law (copyright law) should not block sharing);
2. No Technological Barrier to Sharing (code (limitations on downloads, for example) should not block sharing;
3. Free competition (no alliances should favor one commercial entity over another, or commercial over noncommercial entities).
Some have framed these as "demands" made of the administration. That's like saying the mouse can make demands of the lion. We're not making demands; we're describing good policy. Or at least, good policy as we see it.
Categories: The Essentials
change.gov set free
1 December, 2008 - 20:33
Consistent with the values of any "open government," and with his strong leadership on "free debates" from the very start, the Obama team has modified the copyright notice on change.gov to embrace the freest CC license.
This is great news about a subject that's harder than it seems. One might well ask why is this an issue at all? The one thing copyright law is pretty good at is exempting works of the government from copyright protection. Why should the published work of a transition, or a President, be any different?
I don't think it should be, but I get why this is a hard issue. Whether or not one was free to republish works printed by the GPO, the freedom that digital technologies enables here is certainly enough to give one pause. I'm fine with the pause; I'd be happy to defend the freedom explicitly. But it is understandable that this is something that any administration would have to think through.
I'm glad the thought in this administration led to the right conclusion, so quickly, and in the midst of so much else going on.
Categories: The Essentials
Jamie Boyle's book is out
29 November, 2008 - 22:52Jamie Boyle's fantastic new book is out. And he has beat me in getting it out with a CC license (soon, not soon enough, but soon). Download it for free here. Buy copies for all your friends (and 5 of your enemies) here.
And congratulations to Jamie. It was Boyle's first book more than any work of scholarship that got me into this movement. It it wonderful to see the godfather return to print.
Categories: The Essentials
and while we're at it
26 November, 2008 - 12:29Chris' post says: For Obama media to be offered under a CC license (with the licensed embedded in the media itself) would signal his seriousness about embracing openness, transparency and the nature of discourse on the web. It would also signify a shift towards the type of collaboration typified by Web 2.0 social sites, enabling a modern dialectic relationship between the citizenry and its government.
Note the "seriousness" of Obama's commitment here might well be wondered about. Note the tag line on "change.gov": "CONTENT COPYRIGHT © 2008. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED." Talk about "change" -- an effectively governmental website claiming "all rights reserved."
Categories: The Essentials
from the "what a fantastic idea" department
26 November, 2008 - 12:20Chris Messina's got a fantastic post about YouTube and Creative Commons. As it is CC licensed, I've reproduced it here: Why YouTube should support Creative Commons now
I was in Miami last week to meet with my fellow screeners from the Knight News Challenge and Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson, two vlogger friends whom I met through coworking, started talking about content licensing, specifically as related to President-Elect Barack Obama’s weekly address, which, if things go according to plan, will continue to be broadcast on YouTube.
The question came up: what license should Barack Obama use for his content? This, in turn, revealed a more fundamental question: why doesn’t YouTube let you pick a license for the work that you upload (and must, given the terms of the site, own the rights to in the first place)? And if this omission isn’t intentional (that is, no one decided against such a feature, it just hasn’t bubbled up in the priority queue yet), then what can be done to facilitate the adoption of Creative Commons on the site?
To date, few video sharing sites, save Blip.tv and Flickr (even if they only deal with long photos), have actually embraced Creative Commons to any appreciable degree. Ironically, of all sites, YouTube seems the most likely candidate to adopt Creative Commons, given its rampant remix and republish culture (a culture which continues to vex major movie studies and other fastidious copyright owners).
One might make the argument that, considering the history of illegally shared copyrighted material on YouTube, enabling Creative Commons would simply lead to people mislicensing work that they don’t own… but I think that’s a strawman argument that falls down in practice for a number of reasons:
- First of all, all sites that enable the use of CC licenses offer the scheme as opt-in, defaulting to the traditional all rights reserved use of copyright. Enabling the choice of Creative Commons wouldn’t necessarily affect this default.
- Second, unauthorized sharing of content or digital media under any license is still illegal, whether the relicensed work is licensed under Creative Commons or copyright.
- Third, YouTube, and any other media sharing site, bears some responsibility for the content published on their site, and, regardless of license, reserves the right to remove any material that fails to comply completely with its Terms of Service.
- Fourth, the choice of a Creative Commons license is usually a deliberate act (going back to my first point) intended to convey an intention. The value of this intention — specifically, to enable the lawful reuse and republishing of content or media by others without prior per-instance consent — is a net positive to the health of a social ecosystem insomuch as this choice enables a specific form of freedom: that is, the freedom to give away one’s work under certain, less-restrictive stipulations than the law allows, to aid in establishing a positive culture of sharing and creativity (as we’ve seen on Flickr, SoundCloud and CC Mixter).
Preventing people from choosing a more liberal license conceivably restricts expression, insomuch as it restricts an “efficient, content-enriching value chain” from forming within a legal framework. Or, because all material is currently licensed under the most restrictive regime on YouTube, every re-use of a portion of media must therefore be licensed on a per-instance basis, considerably impeding the legal reuse of other people’s work.
Now, I want to point out something interesting here… as specifically related to both this moment in time and about government ownership of media. A recently released report from the GAO on Energy Efficiency carried with it the following statement on copyright:This is a work of the U.S. government and is not subject to copyright protection in the United States. The published product may be reproduced and distributed in its entirety without further permission from GAO. However, because this work may contain copyrighted images or other material, permission from the copyright holder may be necessary if you wish to reproduce this material separately.
Though it can’t simply put this work into the public domain because of the potential copyrighted materials embedded therein, this statement is about as close as you can get for an assembled work produced by the government.
Now consider that Obama’s weekly “radio address” is self-contained media, not contingent upon the use or reuse of any other copyrighted work. It bears considering what license (if any) should apply (keeping in mind that the government is funded by tax-payer dollars). If not the public domain, under what license should Obama’s weekly addresses be shared? Certainly not all rights reserved! — unfortunately, YouTube offers no other option and thus, regardless of what Obama or the Change.gov folks would prefer, they’re stuck with a single, monolithic licensing scheme.
Interestingly, Google, YouTube’s owner, has supported Creative Commons in the past, notably with their collaboration with Radiohead on the House of Cards open source initiative and with the licensing of the Summer of Code documentation (Yahoo has a similar project with Flickr’s hosting of the Library of Congress’ photo archive under a liberal license).
I think that it’s critical for YouTube to adopt the Creative Commons licensing scheme now, as Barack Obama begins to use the site for his weekly address, because of the powerful signal it would send, in the context of what I imagine will be a steady increase and importance of the use of social media and web video by government agencies.
Don Norman recently wrote an essay on the importance of social signifiers, and I think it underscores my point as to why this issue is pressing now. In contrast to the popular concept of “affordances” in design and design thinking, Norman writes:
A “signifier” is some sort of indicator, some signal in the physical or social world that can be interpreted meaningfully. Signifiers signify critical information, even if the signifier itself is an accidental byproduct of the world. Social signifiers are those that are relevant to social usages. Some social indicators simply are the unintended but informative result of the behavior of others. . . . I call any physically perceivable cue a signifier, whether it is incidental or deliberate. A social signifier is one that is either created or interpreted by people or society, signifying social activity or appropriate social behavior.The “appropriate social behavior”, or behavior that I think Obama should model in his weekly podcasts is that of open and free licensing, introducing the world of YouTube viewers to an alternative form of licensing, that would enable them to better understand and signal to others their intent and desire to share, and to have their creative works reused, without the need to ask for permission first.
For Obama media to be offered under a CC license (with the licensed embedded in the media itself) would signal his seriousness about embracing openness, transparency and the nature of discourse on the web. It would also signify a shift towards the type of collaboration typified by Web 2.0 social sites, enabling a modern dialectic relationship between the citizenry and its government.
I believe that now is the time for this change to happen, and for YouTube to prioritize the choice of Creative Commons licensing for the entire YouTube community.
Categories: The Essentials
me@charlie rose
22 November, 2008 - 19:48
Selected excerpts (and past shows) here.
Categories: The Essentials
Jonathan Coulton on CC
20 November, 2008 - 00:29From the CC Blog: The ever innovative Brooklyn-based singer songwriter Jonathan Coulton has teamed up with Creative Commons to release his greatest hits compilation “JoCo Looks Back” on a 1gb custom Creative Commons jump drive to help support our 2008 campaign. If that weren’t enough, JoCo and CC have also included all of the unmixed audio tracks for every song on the drive. That’s over 700mb of JoCo thing-a-week goodness. Since all of JoCo’s music is released under our Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, this is an incredible opportunity for the public to remix and reuse his fantastic music. Song files are in 320kbps MP3 and unmixed audio tracks are in 256 VBR MP3.
We’ll be offering the drives exclusively at our $50 dollar donation level (and above) until December 31st. Also included are a CreativeCommons.net account, an OpenID identity, and a 2008 campaign sticker.
Jonathan also wrote a wonderful commoner letter speaking on how he, as a musician, uses Creative Commons to support himself and his career. Read it here.
The letter is just about the most moving CC writing I've seen.
Categories: The Essentials
Obama and reform
11 November, 2008 - 04:19A Change Congress supporter writes:"I am a supporter of your Change Congress movement and have followed your work for a long time. I am also an Obama supporter. I am writing to urge you to share your thoughts with your blog readers about what an Obama administration might entail for the Change Congress movement, and whether you think Obama is committed to government reform...."
Great question. I think many of us are so used to disappointment, we're looking for it, and so not even a week after that extraordinary night, many are beginning to wonder what "change" here will really mean?
But I think we need a certain kind of understanding, or patience here. Imagine, by analogy, a loved one has cancer. She decides to get chemo-therapy to deal with the cancer. But on the way to the hospital, imagine she gets hit with a bullet from a drive-by shooting. (Dark, ok, but you'll see the meaning here in a second). Now an ambulance comes and races this gun-shot victim with cancer to the emergency room.
This sad story is a picture of us just now. The "change Washington" rhetoric of this campaign is the analog to the cancer. The financial collapse is the analog of the shooting. And just as with the cancer patient, the collapse is an urgent, immediate problem that must be solved before the more fundamental, long term problem can be addressed.
This means we have to be a bit patient before the more fundamental issue gets addressed. Not that one shouldn't be critical of decisions that will make it more difficult to cure the cancer. But that the lack of an immediate push on that problem is not inconsistent with the design to cure it.
I only hope they recognize that as with the gun-shot, cancer victim, there needs to be essentially two teams thinking about these two different kinds of problems. One focusing immediately on stabilizing the patient. The second on how the stable patient can be treated for the cancer. The skills of the former team are not necessarily the skills of the latter. And if Obama is to be the transformational president he can be, building a strategy around that transformation will be essential.
Update: A good sign: Podesta: “I’ve heard the complaint [that] we’re leaving all this expertise on the side, because we’re leaving all the people who know everything out in the cold. And so be it. This is a commitment that the American public expects, and it’s one that we intend to enforce during the transition.”
Categories: The Essentials
Against Proposition 8
29 October, 2008 - 08:03
Proposition 8 is the CA initiative to amend the CA constitution to ban same-sex marriage. This is far from my usual field, but it is an issue I feel strongly about. Click for 8 minutes of a diversion on 8.
Categories: The Essentials
Remix: What's New
25 October, 2008 - 13:13Spencer asks for a review of his review. I'll reply to one part: the suggestion that the work is "a derivative essay that rehashes a lot of his older work." That would be true if the book were, as he describes it, about "curtailing creativity, innovation, and even some of our most basic freedoms." But that's Free Culture, not REMIX. As I describe in the preface to this REMIX: "In the past, I’ve tried to advance this view for peace by focusing on the costs of this war to innovation, to creativity, and, ultimately, to freedom. My aim in The Future of Ideas was to defend industries that never get born for fear of the insane liability that the current regime of copyright imposes. My subject in Free Culture was the forms of creative expression and freedom that get trampled by the extremism of defending a regime of copyright built for a radically different technological age.
But I finished Free Culture just as my first child was born. And in the four years since, my focus, or fears, about this war have changed. I don’t doubt the concerns I had about innovation, creativity, and freedom. But they don’t keep me awake anymore. Now I worry about the effect this war is having upon our kids. What is this war doing to them? Whom is it making them? How is it changing how they think about normal, right-thinking behavior? What does it mean to a society when a whole generation is raised as criminals?"
This wasn't a focus in Free Culture. It was a passing thought. It is now the frame for REMIX, the motivation for trying to place in the center the good that this net might offer, as a bribe to get policy makers (aka, citizens) to stop this hopeless war, and sue for peace.
That's one focus (and new) at the core of the book. The second is the idea of "remix." REMIX, unlike Free Culture, is focused on a particular kind of creativity. I hadn't recognized, or even thought carefully, about this creativity when I wrote Free Culture. But the Sousa quote I've referred to again and again (railing against "talking machines," he observes "we will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cords will be eliminated by a process of evolution was was the tail of man when he came from the ape.") got me to think about the importance of "democratic creativity" -- meaning a kind of creativity that ordinary people engage just like the professionals. This focus on the amateur vs. the professional of course is a theme of others -- Benkler, most importantly. But I liked the way it explained something about how creativity was different in he 20th century from every other century, including the 21st.
The third idea in REMIX is the one Spencer's review focuses on -- the emergence of what I call the "hybrid" -- and here Spencer has nice words. Although this section borrows heavily from the work of others, including The Long Tail by Chris Anderson and Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, Lessig breaks new ground.That passage made me happy. Because I was inspired by Chris and Don/Anthony (and Benkler). But I am happy that even in an otherwise critical review, it's clear that this part "breaks new ground."
These are three ideas, or frames, that move REMIX beyond Free Culture. Different points, not "rehashing" of old. Is it "derivative"? Well, of course, it is the thought that I currently have about a subject I've been working on for a decade, deriving from thoughts I had before. But I had thought — I had hoped — the new added something to the old. These three things frame the new.
Finally, Spencer criticizes my 35 pages of prescription at the end. Most annoying, he devotes only the last 35 pages of the book to his reform plan, and some of those ideas are not even that new. Better, he suggests, would have been if I had "used Remix to tell the story of his Creative Commons."
I'll leave it to others to tell the story of Creative Commons. Understanding requires a less self-interested source. But I'm not sure I get what's "annoying" about the 35 pages. I'm not sure how "new" the suggestions are. I'm more concerned with whether they're true. Spencer seems upset that he has heard versions of them before (because the proposals I advance in fact are not the proposals I had advanced before). I guess I'm not convinced of the fairness of that annoyance. This is a second book on the culture issues. The things I believed in book one I still believe in book two. Sure, it would have been more interesting had I come to believe completely different things. ("Wait a minute -- Valenti is right. What was I thinking!") But I didn't. I still think the copyright system regulates too much. I still believe social resources should be devoted differently. I believe even more now in the "humility" that law needs.
Though there are things that remain the same, I wrote Remix because the work of many others had helped me see important parts of this debate differently. Most importantly, the good, the optimistic, the promising parts. Remix and hybrids: they give us yet another reason to end this war.
But enough. Spencer's a good soul. He's written well for Businessweek, and while I'm just midway through his book, Creative Capital, I'm sure I'll have nicer things to say about his than he about mine. I've said this book was essentially finished a year ago. I've moved on to different work. So "you won't have [Free Culture Lessig] to kick around any more, gentlemen, because this is my last [free culture book]." (And see, if I were 15, and had any real talent, I would have taken Nixon's press conference, superimposed my face on Nixon's, added some Gil or NIN music, or whatever.)
Categories: The Essentials
Reviews that get it
25 October, 2008 - 00:20It was a tough morning swallowing Spencer's review. My reaction was -- "really, that's what you see in the book?!" None of the key points that made it worth my writing the book were visible to him (or at least, as evinced by the review). And that, frankly, was astonishing, and astonishingly depressing.
But it is the end of the day (here in Hong Kong), and with it comes a review by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, that is actually about the stuff in this book that is what the book's about, and new (and of course, as I think, important). What the book "is" of course is hard to say. But her review is actually a review of the book I thought I wrote.
Most amazing fact of the day however: I posted a Flickr image of the cover of the book to distract from the Spencer review. I didn't know the photographer, and certainly didn't know where she was from. I'm not even quite sure how I even came across the image. But after my talk here in Hong Kong, she came up to me. She had seen the image on my blog.
Categories: The Essentials
Spencer didn't like the book
24 October, 2008 - 08:49
Spence Ante didn't like Remix.But Remix is Lessig's weakest effort to date, a derivative essay that rehashes a lot of his older work. Like Martin Scorsese doing another mobster flick, Lessig seems uninspired, groping for a fresh take on familiar themes. Most annoying, he devotes only the last 35 pages of the book to his reform plan, and some of those ideas are not even that new. But he does give me a chance to share this beautiful picture from laihiu.
Categories: The Essentials
weirdly, I got an editorial
22 October, 2008 - 21:56The Guardian gave me an editorial today: In Praise of ... Lawrence Lessig.
Categories: The Essentials
