Category Archives: free culture

One year ago — April 23, 2004 — about a hundred students gathered at Swarthmore College to begin “an international student movement to free culture.” (Dan Hunter described the event in LegalAffairs). The event was organized by the students who had sued Diebold after Diebold sued them. The movement now has about ten chapters around the country.
Happy Birthday, Free Culture Movement! Creative Commons has a present that we wanted to announce today. Bizarrely, we’re still waiting for the license. More soon (we hope). Continue reading →

As reported at BoingBoing (thanks John), Trent Reznor of NIN has released a GarageBand wrap of a forthcoming song. The 70 meg download opens directly into GarageBand. The terms of the license (which you’ve got to accept to play) aren’t too bad. Not the share-cropper culture (the star owns the remixes) that the lawyers for some icons have insisted upon (Mr. Bowie, e.g.) — NIN permits sharing of the remixes, though not for commercial purposes. Would be very cool, however, were the expressions of freedom expressible in a machine-readable form, and in a license that others could combine other content with, say, in a friendster-like application made for music. Continue reading →

But the event at the New York Public Library with Jeff Tweedy, Steven Johnson, and me on Thursday, 4/7, will be webcast. Click the image above to go to the extremely cool setup at Wilcoworld.net. Continue reading →

The 711 unique comments submmitted to the Copyright Office on the “Orphan Works” question have been posted. This is a fantastic response. The comments of Creative Commons are posted here. Thanks to the Free Culture Movement, EFF and PublicKnowledge for running the Orphan Works site.
Now maybe we should get a wiki going to have a collaborative analysis of the comments? Continue reading →

So I did something today for the very last time in my life. I’m publishing a comment in the Minnesota Law Review about an article by Brett Frischmann titled “An Economic Theory of Infrastructure.” His is a great article; I was happy to write the comment.
But today, on the brink of publication, I had to confront the “Publication Agreement.” In order to give the Minnesota Law Review my work, I have also to give them my copyright. In particular, they get the “exclusive right to authorize the publication, reproduction, and distribution” of my work. They have in turn sold that right to Lexis and Westlaw.
Never again. It has taken me too long to resolve myself about this, and it was too late in the process of this article to insist on something different. But from this moment on, I am committed to the Open Access pledge:
I will not agree to publish in any academic journal that does not permit me the freedoms of at least a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
This is, of course, much less than RMS insists upon. My views are more confused than his. I am not yet convinced of this point w/r/t books. I am not yet convinced w/r/t eliminating the non-commercial restriction. But, still, there is no academic or scholarship related reason why the publishing of academic works today should require more of me than this. And to the extent academic publishing demands more of me than this, I will not support it.
At this point, I know of one law journal that may, soon, be able to publish my work. I hope there will be more. But until there are, there will be no more law review articles by Lawrence Lessig – a relief to many, no doubt; a loss to none, to be sure. Continue reading →

So I wrote a piece in Wired about the IP wars and music. My argument was we needed fewer voices like mine, and more voices like Tweedy’s. Wired liked that, and decided they needed to arrange an event with more of my voice. Who am I to say no? Continue reading →

So there’s a blog first created by the volunteers who watched Fox to create the data necessary to produced OutFoxed. They posted an item about a Bill O’Reilly column, which itself was posted on the web. The company syndicating O’Reilly’s column wrote them a nasty letter, telling them to take the column down. They did, and replaced it with a link. The same company wrote again, insisting that the blog was guilty of “unauthorized linking.”
Dear syndicators of Bill: Me thinks there’s no such concept as illegal linking (outside of China, at least, and please, don’t pester me with misreadings of the 2600 case). Indeed, I think that I, like anyone else, am perfectly free to link to the column, as this link does. And indeed, I’d invite anyone else out there who thinks that we still live in a FREE LINKING world to link to the same. Got to find some way to keep those lawyers busy. Continue reading →

There’s a great stew brewing at Boston Legal. Next week’s episode has an OutFoxed plot. A school principal uses FOXBlocker to block Fox on televisions in his school. David Kelley’s original script explicitly mentioned Fox and Bill O’Reilly. ABC apparently forced him to remove the references. The network has also refused to run an ad for Outfoxed. Continue reading →

On my way back from Memphis, where I spoke at the Rhodes College Institute on the Profession of the Law. This is an annual event (well, my speaking there is not an annual event, but you understand), and I was struck not just by the College (which seems plucked from Oxbridge), but by the seriousness with which 100 lawyers spend a morning thinking, and arguing, about real issues. Maybe its something about the pure Tennessee air (my mom’s from Chattanooga), or the distance from Washington, DC. But it is such a pleasure to be able to talk about these issues with people thinking about them genuinely. Continue reading →

Kembrew McLeod’s great new book, Freedom of Expression, has just been released. You can buy it from Amazon, or download it under a Creative Commons license here. Having read the book myself, I’d recommend both. Continue reading →