the growing commons

Posted on January 7, 2003 by Lessig

Bruce Perens has extraordinarily great news about a deal he’s struck with Prentice Hall to permit “open source” publication of a series of books. It was no surprise that Tim O’Reilly got the value of adding work to the commons (as O’Reilly press has with a bunch of titles donated to the public domain and a bunch of content to be licensed under a CC license: read here). But it is a real testament to Bruce’s skill that he convinced Prentice Hall. Congratulations. I only hope we can help make the licenses part of the semantic web.

Posted in creative commons | 3 Comments

Pro Bono Advertising: In Praise of POBOX.COM

Posted on January 5, 2003 by Lessig

I’ve been a subscriber to POBOX.COM for many years now. It has solved many email headaches and is a great service that deserves some pro bono praise. So click more for the praise (and obviously, I’ve got no financial connection (except my annual bill) to this great company at all).

The primary aim of POBOX.COM is mail forwarding. You sign up for an address (it gives you five aliases with any account), and it then forwards mail to that address to any number of mail servers. So, when you send mail to [email protected], it gets routed to two separate email accounts.

I originally wanted this facility because I wanted to be able to redirect my mail to a local server. That’s become less important over time. More important now is simply the ability to echo mail. All my mail goes to two separate servers. I use one as my primary server, and one as my backup. The backup is a webmail service, so it is easy to get access to mail on the road.

The key benefit to this is that always, inevitably, one server is down at a critical moment, and I can bounce to the second if I need to. (I use AT&T as my primary email account, mainly because of the international dialing numbers. It has this annoying flaw, however, that if you get dumped from the line midway through downloading mail, it can remain “busy” for up to 10 minutes. I’d be eager to discover a replacement with an equally broad international dialup network.)

The one hassle to the email backup system is that sometimes the backup account gets full, and it can be a hassle to go through erasing all the emails on the account. But here’s where a classically-internet story comes in: I sent an email to the developer of a program called PopMonitor, asking whether he knew of a utility that could quickly delete the contents of a mailbox. PopMonitor allows you to do that, but only after downloading all the headers. In the spirit of the internet, this good soul from the Netherlands wrote such a program (called MailTrasher), and gives it away for free. So now, every week or so, it takes a second or so to trash my backup mail account.

POBOX.COM has been a great company. It provides lots of other services (like spam and email filtering), and has been extremely fast in responding to technical problems. Highly recommended for anyone who either (1) can’t keep a job, (2) is running from the law, or (3) needs the reliability of multiple systems to store and access his or her email.

Posted in heroes | 4 Comments

The Pan FAQs

Posted on January 5, 2003 by Lessig

We’ve posted a page on the Emily Somma Peter Pan case with a FAQ about the case. There’s a link at the end of the FAQ with a suggestion for more questions. I’d be grateful for any suggestions, about new questions or old.

Posted in free culture | 2 Comments

Broadband III: the sad state of US broadband

Posted on January 4, 2003 by Lessig

So in 1998, as a Christmas present to my parents, I promised to give them broadband service when it became available. They live just outside Hilton Head, SC. No San Francisco, no doubt (where broadband at 1.5 mbs is available at about $50 a month), but still, no backwater.

For the first time this year, service is getting close. A company called Hargray promises 768kbs for the amazing low price of $100 a month. No cable service available from AT&T. And no service available from anyone in the 1.5 mbs range.

Meanwhile, to repeat again: Here in Japan, they are selling 100 mbs for $50/month, 12 mbs for $25.

Posted in bad code | 10 Comments

IP extremism moves east

Posted on January 4, 2003 by Lessig

The Nikkei is reporting today that the government will propose a law to “enhance copyright holder protection.” You can’t read the story without buying a trial subscription (aka, that’s bad enough). But worse is the substance of what the Nikkei reports. The story reports what has been reported often before: That the legislation will increase copyright terms for movies and games from 50 to 70 years (again invoking the bogus harmonization argument). But the most amazing proposed change is this:

“Plaintiffs in lawsuits defending their copyrights often have difficulty submitting evidence that offenders have infringed upon their rights. So the government aims to shift the burden of proof to the defendants, requiring them to prove that they have produced and marketed their products without violating the plaintiffs’ rights.”

That’s a quote from the story, and as the story has a bunch of factual mistakes in it, I can’t be sure it is accurate. But if true, it means that in Japan, you’re guilty until proven innocent.

I’ll be reviewing the draft law as soon as I can, and reporting more. But the bottom line is the same: IP extremism continues unabated. There’s so much to praise in this amazing country. It is sad to see them following the extremists.

Posted in japan | 8 Comments

end-to-end spam control

Posted on January 4, 2003 by Lessig

Joi makes a great point about the character of different spam control methods. While in the narrow sense, this is not an end-to-end issue (as Saltzer, Clark and Reed framed it), in a general sense, spam solutions can be divided into those that respect end-to-end values, and those that don’t. The label+bounty solution (which has a nice discussion on /. and which I’d lose my job over if it doesn’t work), I’m happy to acknowledge, is end-to-end respectful.

Posted in ideas | 1 Comment

forget mickey: guess what’s free if the supreme court enforces “limited times”?

Posted on January 4, 2003 by Lessig

I had never looked this up, but thanks to “thumbtacks” for sending this. If the Sonny Bono Act is unconstitutional, then “Happy Birthday!” will be free!

Posted in eldred.cc | 11 Comments

code is law is code

Posted on January 3, 2003 by Lessig

Bill Fitler has put together an interesting page of CodeLaws, by which he means technology designed to implement some sort of policy. The list is an important step is mapping all the ways in which behavior gets regulated. He’s eager (as am I) for any input to make the list more complete. His weblog is here.

Posted in ideas | Comments Off on code is law is code

ticketstubs

Posted on January 3, 2003 by Lessig

Matt Haughey is one of the creators who helped make Creative Commons happen. He’s built an amazingly cool site called ticketstubs that enables people to share stories around events.

Posted in creative commons | Comments Off on ticketstubs

the race to the top continues

Posted on January 3, 2003 by Lessig

There’s a very interesting article in the Times (registration blah blah blah) about a new push in Europe to increase copyright terms. Let’s remember the sequence here. Germany increased its terms to compensate for WWII. The EU then increased its terms to match Germany. The US then increased its terms to “harmonize” with the EU. That was the Sonny Bono Act. But of course, the “harmony” of the Sonny Bono Act was like some of the worst of the Bono and Cher acts — disharmony. (For a chart showing how the Sonny Bono Act actually increased disharmony between US and EU terms, see Dennis Karjala’s page). So to respond to the disharmony caused by the Sonny Bono Act, now Europe is calling for another increase in their term. Japan too is doing the same.

Jason Schultz’s work shows clearly what we’ve been arguing for a very long time: Longer terms lock up much more than it could ever benefit. This spiral of increasing terms will mean that less will be available, not more. Obviously, there is a world of work to do before this message is understood.

Posted in eldred.cc | 3 Comments