Author Archives: Lessig

Of course, no one will believe this, but this event was actually scheduled before the AP threatened Shepard Fairey. It is the last of my REMIX events, which was the last of my copyright/cyber books. Tickets here. Continue reading →

As mentioned, the Fair Use Project at Stanford’s CIS is representing Shepard Fairey in his suit against the AP. To that end, we’d be grateful for some net-based knowledge. How many photos are there “like” the beautiful photograph that Mannie Garcia took (the one on the left; the one on the right is a CC licensed photo taken by Steve Jurvetson)? Can you send any examples to [email protected]?
Also, please send any favorite examples of photos used as visual references for other works of art. We lawyers don’t know much, but we can learn pretty quickly.
Thanks for any help. Continue reading →

So I’m the first to agree that the structure of compensation on Wall Street was begging for just this sort of disaster. But I don’t get the wisdom of the pay cap.
The pay cap means there will be two kinds of firms — one that can pay people whatever it wants; one that is capped (at different levels no doubt). But then the best employees from the capped firms can move to the uncapped firms, leaving the, well, not best employees overseeing the recovery of this now government invested firms.
Why do we want to be creating an incentive for not quite the best managers to be managing the recovery of firms we’re financing? Continue reading →

My book CC-licensed book Free Culture has been translated into French and made available as a free eBook. I am enormously grateful to Fabrice Epelboin for carrying my words into France at such a critical moment zin the debate. Continue reading →

In the world of debates about network neutrality, consumption caps have an ambiguous status. Some see it as a kind of discrimination. Others, not. I’ve not been convinced they tend to support strategic behavior. But a recent experience in New Zealand did wonders to convince me of the harm they will do to the development of the Internet that could be.
I subscribe to TV series through iTunes. House is one of those series. When a new episode is released, my iTunes was configured to download it automatically, at least if iTunes was opened. The downloading happens the background.
In November, I was in New Zealand. After I arrived, I went to the hotel, signed up for (insanely expensive) Internet service, synced my iPhone, and turned to the task of answering the one billion emails that had filled my inbox in the time it takes to fly from SFO to New Zealand. About 30 minutes into my work, a message flashed on my screen that I had “violated the ethical rules” of the network to which I had just paid $50 for 1 days access. And because I had violated ethical rules, I was to be “fined” NZ $100 (about another $50).
Seems the service I had paid $50 to purchase had a 1GB download cap attached to it. My House episode was 1.5GB (stupidly, iTunes pushes you buy HD). So midway through the download, the service cut off my connection and charge my room the fine for unethical behavior.
No doubt, Internet in New Zealand is expensive (though more competition may help). And of course, 1GB is ordinarily quite sufficient for normal use (though when I prepare a talk, it is quite easy for me to consume much more than that as I find stuff (including videos) to include in my talk). And obviously, I had agreed to the contract, and whether intentionally or not, I had violated the limits of the conflict.
But the point is this: When companies like Time Warner suggest bandwidth caps are just about stopping “piracy,” that’s not quite true. They’re also about stopping lots of other business models that try to leverage the real potential of fast, cheap Internet access (assuming of course we can get fast, cheap Internet, or keep it where we’ve got it). Continue reading →

Check out the full interview at the Booksmith site. Continue reading →