-
Archives
- August 2015
- July 2015
- June 2015
- May 2015
- April 2015
- March 2015
- February 2015
- January 2015
- December 2014
- November 2014
- October 2014
- September 2014
- August 2014
- July 2014
- June 2014
- May 2014
- April 2014
- March 2014
- February 2014
- January 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
- September 2013
- July 2013
- June 2013
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- May 2011
- March 2011
- November 2010
- October 2010
- August 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
- February 2006
- January 2006
- December 2005
- November 2005
- October 2005
- September 2005
- August 2005
- July 2005
- June 2005
- May 2005
- April 2005
- March 2005
- February 2005
- January 2005
- December 2004
- November 2004
- October 2004
- September 2004
- August 2004
- July 2004
- June 2004
- May 2004
- October 2003
- September 2003
- August 2003
- July 2003
- June 2003
- May 2003
- April 2003
- March 2003
- January 2003
- December 2002
- November 2002
- October 2002
- September 2002
- August 2002
-
Meta
Monthly Archives: April 2008
It's Comrade Lessig to you, bub.
Julian Sanchez has a piece in Ars Technica analyzing my recent outing by PFF as a communist. Or socialist. Or quasi-socialist utopianist. Whatever. I’ll leave the criticisms of the criticisms of my scholarship to the reader to judge. One perfectly framed point of the piece, though, is something I completely agree with: There is a divide in the libertarian camp about IP extremism. And when, as I’d put it, “libertarians … ‘start to defect’ from a strong-IP stance, copyright incumbents [will] be left with only their wholly-owned-subsidiaries as defenders.”
Then, I suggest, real progress will be made. Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
16 Comments
A physicist on the "Lessig style"
Many have asked me about my Keynote (it is not PowerPoint) presentation style. I honestly don’t have much to say about it, as I’ve not thought it through. But Chris Tunnell, a researcher on the SNO neutrino physics experiment has, and he sent me his thoughts about how and why (and whether) the style works based on his own experience using it for physics presentations. Read about it in the extended entry. Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
36 Comments
Change Congress resources files
I’ve given now four versions of the lecture launching Change Congress. You can see them all (and more) at the Change Congress channel at blip.tv [change-congress.blip.tv]. Some have asked for the resources to remix (by which I take it they mean, improve on) the message. I’ve very happily now made those resources available here.
On that page you’ll find links to two directories, one related to the April 4 Harvard speech, and the other related to the April 11 UCSB speech. Each folder has a keynote file, a ppt file, an image for each slide, and a zip wrapping up all the images. The page will be fancied up soon enough. Everything is under a CC-BY license. Remix away. Continue reading
Posted in ChangeCongress
4 Comments
On my "Tragedy and Farce": PFF on me
PFF has launched what they promise to be a “series of papers that will critique Free Culture and the Free Culture Movement.” Their first is a piece by Tom Sydnor II called “Tragedy and Farce: An Analysis of the Book FREE CULTURE.” Calling the book akin to “quasi-socialist utopianism,” the 17 page review is certain to be an interesting read. Someone should add this to the Anti-Lessig Reader. Continue reading
Posted in free culture
10 Comments
The most interesting part of the writers' strike
Just after the writer’s (and writers’) strike ended, Matt Prager (who worked for 15 years in Hollywood as a writer and executive) sent me this fantastic essay about what was really at stake in the strike (guess…). Here’s the start:
The WGA strike to date has been more or less characterized as a strike over money; most press reports have dealt with negotiation demands like residuals and up-front compensation on internet streams and downloads, jurisdiction over reality and animation, and other such issues. However, the press reports have missed the central, underlying issue of this strike: copyright. This battle is not “poor laborer” versus “greedy company” – everyone in Hollywood is pretty greedy frankly. Rather, in the same way that fiction is the business of Hollywood, so is the entire underpinning of Hollywood built on an enormous fiction. But to understand the fiction, you first need to understand some facts.
Here’s the balance. Continue reading
Posted in free culture
15 Comments
Change Congress @ UCSB
So here’s the last in this series for a while (I’m taking a break off the grid with my family starting next week — Madagascar). This version emphasizes the Framers and “independence.” Suggesting the meme — a new Declaration of Independence.
There’s a YouTube version which is better synced this time. Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
5 Comments
The RedState flap
Many of you have written about the REDSTATE blog entry, pointing to an excerpt of a talk I gave at Google in which I showed a video by Javier Prato in which Jesus is singing Gloria Gaynor’s “I will survive.” The YouTube video makes it seem as if this is all there was in my talk. And so my inbox has been filled with people outraged I would have made such a disrespectful video about Jesus, etc.
This will be obvious to everyone ordinarily here, but for the record:
(1) I did not make the “Jesus Christ: The Musical” video. Javier Prato did.
(2) I used the video in probably 5 or 6 out of 200 talks over the last three years, in the section of my talks in which I show examples of “remix” creativity.
(3) I show these videos not because I endorse the message, or even believe in the message. For example, here‘s a fantastically clever video about John Kerry I showed dozens of times during the 2004 election. It makes fun of Kerry — the man I supported for President. The point was not the substance of the message; it was to demonstrate the spread of the technique.
(4) The Jesus video was relevant to the story I was telling because the artist was threatened by the copyright holders because of the video.
(5) I decided to stop using the video when one Christian whom I knew told me he thought unhelpful to the purpose for which I was using it. That seemed right, so I dropped it.
It will be interesting (in a root canal kind of way) to see how far or deep PC-ism runs in this society. Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
52 Comments
Testifying @ FCC @ Stanford
I was asked to give some overview testimony at the FCC’s “Network Neutrality” hearing at Stanford yesterday. Here’s the testimony.
One panelist, George Ou, was particularly exercised about what he perceived to be a policy by Free Press and EFF to push for “metered access.” I don’t speak for the Free Press or EFF, but my view is simply that tiered access for consumers does not violate “network neutrality” principles. Obviously I’d prefer a world of flat rate, fast service. And if we actually had any meaningful ISP competition, we might get to that. But the narrow question I’ve addressed here is whether it would violate neutrality principles for ISPs to offer different bandwidth commitments for different prices. I don’t believe it does. Continue reading
Posted in NetNeutrality
55 Comments
A letter to Pennsylvania (or how to become a superdelegate)
I grew up in Pennsylvania, and went to university at Penn (as did just about everyone on my Dad’s side of the family). I spent a couple days near where I grew up about three weeks ago, speaking at Penn State and Bucknell, and then travelled to Philadelphia to speak at an Obama event at Penn.
It is surprising how home never quite leaves you, no matter how far away you may be. And so as I saw PA leading up to a primary, I thought about writing a letter. Pennsylvania was the last place where I dreamed about life as Superman (at the age of 7); here’s 9 minutes asking PA Democrats to become super-delegates.
(There’s a version at YouTube, but the quality is astonishingly poor. I don’t get the reason for the difference — it is the same file uploaded in both places. But the sync is way off.) Continue reading
Posted in presidential politics
16 Comments
CC Newsletter — this is really beautiful
Here‘s the latest CC newsletter. It is extraordinarily beautiful and well done. Continue reading
Posted in creative commons
Leave a comment