Category Archives: good code

Presses Universitaires de Lyon has made my Future of Ideas available online (for free) in French. It is also available in printed form (EU25 less freely). Continue reading →

EFF’s Fred von Lohmann (the lawyer who won the Grokster case in the 9th Circuit) will be arguing EFF’s first Wiki case on Tuesday in New York. Details:

Tuesday, Jan 16 2007
2pm, federal district court, eastern district of ny (brooklyn)
225 Cadman Plaza East
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Continue reading →

I’ve been a long time supporter of SecondLife. Yesterday, they made me proud. SecondLife announced it will GPL its client software. And it committed itself to freeing the back-end as well.

How significant is SecondLife? Here’s a really interesting empirical study by Tristan Louis about SecondLife activity. Continue reading →

Wow. Post an entry Friday, spend a weekend with your family, and return Monday to a brilliantly populated Wiki — with a matrix added.

I’ve followed up on some of the comments in the extended entry below.

One general point: Again, these “distinctions” are not; they describe continua, not categories. Maybe there should be a scale on each access — from extreme RW to extreme RO, total “commercial” to total “sharing.” I’ll think about how best to tinker with that as I see more examples.

Thanks again for the examples — and please feel free to add more. Continue reading →

People are often very kind (at least to me) about my speeches. But the truly inspired rhetorician of our age is Eben Moglen. Here’s a video of his keynote at the Plone conference in Seattle. The speech is transcribed here.

Nick Carr on DRM:

No, DRM is about controlling the business model for selling online music. And if it looks like there won’t be much additional sales growth through iTunes, then music companies are going to start selling unprotected MP3s. In an iPod world, they have little choice.

Unless, of course, Apple starts allowing other kinds of DRM-protected song files to play on iPods. But even that unlikely event might not matter much. It would seem that the best business strategy for record companies at this point is to open the floodgates for online music retailing, which would almost certainly bring a burst of innovation in packaging and pricing.

Continue reading →

From the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property:

Recommendation 4:Policy makers should adopt the principle that the term and scope of protection for IP rights should not be altered retrospectively.

Bravo. Now if only the British (and every) government could muster the courage to follow this advice. Continue reading →

Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals will visit Second Life on December 7th, from 6-8pm Second Life Time (PST). Read all about it here.

I was a law clerk for Judge Posner. It was the best job a lawyer could imagine. Unlike must judges, Posner writes his own opinions. That meant the job of a clerk was simply to argue — and he invited, indeed insisted upon, strong and vigorous argument. (Once I sent him a letter very strongly criticizing a draft of a book he was writing. The next morning I had second thoughts about the tone of the letter. I wrote a letter to apologize. He wrote back immediately: Never apologize for strongly stating your case. “I’m surrounded by sycophants. I don’t need that from you.”

He is the most prolific person I know. He is the most influential lawyer of his time. His work in law and economics revolutionized the legal academy. His opinions as a judge are easily among the most influential in the federal judiciary. You may not agree with his politics (as I don’t on many things). But don’t let political correctness block the chance to “see” this extraordinary figure.

Most won’t like the conclusions of the book he’ll be discussing. But there are always many more interesting Posner channels. He’s a big fan of The Matrix. And cats.

Were it not 3am my time when he is in Second Life, I’d be there too. Let me know how it goes. Continue reading →

Let’s say you release a draft of a paper using PDF. But when people open the paper to read it, you’d like the PDF to check whether there’s a more recent version available. If there is, you’d like it to indicate as much — somewhere. Obviously, you could always include a link that says “For the most current version, go here.” But is there a way to say, “A more recent version of this document is available here.”? Continue reading →

I may spend too much time thinking about this, but how is it one reverses the hatred of a people after war? WWII was no doubt very different. But interestingly, Germans talk about this a lot — about the brilliance in the American strategy after the war to rebuild (what we weirdly call) “friendship” between the German and American people.

That strategy had a government component (2% of the GDP spent on the Marshall Plan) and a private component. The private component came largely through the delivery of “CARE Packages.” As described on CARE’s website, these packages were originally surplus food packs initially prepared to support a US invasion of Japan. Americans were invited to send these packages to victims of the War. Eventually, over 100,000,000 packages were sent by Americans over the next two decades, first in Europe, then throughout the world.

A German friend this afternoon was recounting this story to me — he too is obsessed with how to reduce Iraqi anger. But the part he emphasized that I had missed originally was how significant it was to Germans to know that these packages were sent by ordinary Americans. It wasn’t the government sending government aid; it was American volunteers taking time to personalize an act of giving.

CARE has given up the CARE Package. So too has it moved far from the individual-driven model of giving that marked its birth. But I wonder how current victims of war would react to a repeat of 1945-giving. A related idea has been taken up by a 10-year old from New Jersey. But what if every city in America selected sister cities throughout Afghanistan and Iraq, and individual volunteers from the US repeated what our parents and grandparents did 60 years ago? Continue reading →