Save Betamax

Posted on September 15, 2004 by Lessig

The good folks at Downhill Battle have organized a call-in campaign re the Induce Act. Check it out here.

Posted in free culture | 12 Comments

Gilmore v. Ashcroft

Posted on September 15, 2004 by Lessig

John Gilmore’s battle to force the government to explain the basis upon which it demands that airlines verify an ID before permitting someone on a plane got a small victory last week. The government had asked to file its brief, defending a rule that is itself secret, in secret. The 9th Circuit said no.

Posted in heroes | 1 Comment

New Scientist (almost) gets it

Posted on September 15, 2004 by Lessig

There’s a great article in the New Scientist about the dangers in IP extremism. As it rightly notes,

THERE are some things in life we take for granted. Among them are the ability to lend each other books, record TV programmes, back up expensive computer programs, and sell on our old CDs when we’ve got tired of them. … That could change. New technologies are giving copyright owners the power to control the time and place we can view or play digital versions of music, films and text so tightly that we run the risk of losing these rights altogether.

But to read the article at the New Scientist website, you’ll need to subscribe. Oh well. One step at a time.

Posted in free culture | 27 Comments

meanwhile, in the world of real issues

Posted on September 15, 2004 by Lessig

Making Torture Legal, a story by Anthony Lewis about an issue that ought to be an issue in this issueless campaign, is the best of its kind that I’ve seen. I was referred to it by an Israeli friend. As he said to me, “of course there is torture in Israeli prisons, but there is nothing remotely as bad as this.”

Truth, and justice. May it again be the American way.

Posted in presidential politics | 17 Comments

Fair Use in China

Posted on September 15, 2004 by Lessig

That’ll teach us for teaching the Chinese about the importance of copyright law. Google has been threatened for using news summaries in its Hong Kong Google News service.

Posted in bad law | 5 Comments

Remix Outfoxed

Posted on September 15, 2004 by Lessig

ofx_poster.jpg

Robert Greenwald has released the interviews from Outfoxed under a Creative Commons license, inviting others to remix the interviews to tell their own story about Fox. Robert had wanted to release the full film for remix, but fears about enabling the reuse of original Fox materials got that idea stopped. But you can download and rework the interviews from archive.org here. A bittorrent file is available here from Torrentocracy. See the blog entry there, and here.

Posted in free culture | 4 Comments

Kerry and the IP extremists

Posted on September 13, 2004 by Lessig

One of the exciting thing about the early days of the Democratic primary was that there was at least some debate about whether the Democratic Party would continue to be led by IP extremists. Some of the worst in IP came, after all, from the Clinton administration. Reflecting on that, many were hopeful we’d see some new thinking. Many of the most passionate Deaniacs were eager to see new thinking on this issue. Senator Edwards addressed some of this on this blog.

Word now is that Bruce Lehman, former Assistant Secretary of Commerce, and Commissioner of Patents, is spreading the word that he is running IP policy on the Kerry campaign. In the scheme of extremists, few are more extreme. Of all the government “Czars” in our form of government, he proved himself to be most to be feared.

Yet another bit of depressing news, if true, from this extraordinarily important campaign.

Posted in free culture | 22 Comments

always wanted to do this

Posted on September 10, 2004 by Lessig

So I’m at the Tech Nation Summit, watching Dan Gillmor talk about real-time blogging.

Posted in good code | 1 Comment

yet more irrelevant questions

Posted on September 10, 2004 by Lessig

So, shamefully, I’ve contributed to this irrelevant question blog (“Mr. President, how many times have you been arrested?”), but I can’t begin to describe fully how depressing this presidential campaign has been.

Why do we waste attention on these ridiculous questions?

I’m sure Mr. Bush’s record was nothing to be proud of — his drinking problem is well documented, and these things go together. But I’m also sure he is no longer that man — and for anyone who has seen someone overcome that demon, you know the courage this requires. So I really don’t care how many times he was arrested, I don’t care if he used power to escape his obligations in the Reserve — whether he should be our President depends only upon whether the policies he will pursue are good for this nation.

Likewise, re Mr. Kerry: I am sure he demonstrated unimaginable courage in volunteering to serve his country in an unpopular war, and then mustering the courage to articulate brilliantly the reasons why that war was wrong. But we’re not electing a captain for a military unit — if shots are fired, he will follow orders, not give them — and while it would be great if he could find a way to articulate why this war was wrong, the presidency is not a reward for great Senate testimony. Whether he should be our President depends upon whether the policies he will pursue are good for the nation.

So why can’t we actually talk about the conflict in these policies? I’m confident about that choice, but I would love my view to be challenged by real arguments, and a focus on real issues. CBS almost seems proud of their idiotic story. Shame on CBS. Shame on us.

Posted in presidential politics | 67 Comments

Just how lost PFF is

Posted on September 9, 2004 by Lessig

I continue to be astonished at how far PFF has moved from its roots. The group has issued a press release demanding Supreme Court review of Grokster, buttressed with supporting blog entries by Bill Adkinson and a “grid” by Solveig Singleton with a six (yes, count them, six, with some including italics) factor test that courts are to apply to decide whether a technology is legal or not.

I can well understand New Dealers racing to craft multifactored tests to regulate innovation. But I thought the whole point of the conservative (economic) movement was to teach us how harmful such regulation was to innovation and growth. Any test that cannot be applied on summary judgment guarantees that federal judges will be forced into a complex balancing to decide which innovation should be allowed. And thus, any industry threatened with competition can then use the courts to extort from these new competitors payment before they are permitted to compete. That is precisely what Valenti says the VCR case was about. He didn’t want to stop the VCR, he tell us. He wanted only to force VCR manufacturers to pay for the right to sell consumers VCRs.

Courts, and lawyers, have ruled Silicon Valley long enough. The great hope of the Grokster opinion was that it would return us to the time when entrepreneurs could invent without seeking a permission slip from a federal court (to borrow from the President) . It is simply bizarre to see PFF now call for a return to the days of industrial policy regulated by federal judges. Especially bizarre when you consider how taxing this policy will be to many of the “supporters” of PFF. Many (e.g., Apple, Microsoft, Intel), but alas not all (EMI, Vivendi, BMG). Thus the danger of putting principle up for bid.

Posted in bad code | 130 Comments