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Sunday, August 18, 2002
Ass2Ass 
| | Cathy Seipp in UPI: Blogapalooza. Not just another piece on blogs, even though that's what she kind of implied about it to Ken Layne. It's really good. It also says what needs to be said: blogs are journals, and not just diaries: |
| | "Blog" used to mostly mean someone's personal online diary, typically concerned with boyfriend problems or techie news, but after Sept. 11 a slew of new or refocused media junkie/political sites reshaped the entire Internet media landscape. |
| | Blogs now refer to addictive web journals that comment on the news, usually in rudely clever tones, with links to stories that back up the commentary with evidence. |
| | As he so often does, Ken supplies the most quotable line: We can fact-check your ass. |
Wow
| | Cory and Dan: you guys are aces. I'm speechless. Well, almost. Thanks! |
| | [Later...] What's really wierd is that my email program flagged some of these expressions of generosity as spam, perhaps because they came with statements from PayPal like "You've got cash!" |
| | Again, many thanks to everybody! |
Only 10?
Who does what
| | Lessig asks: "What have we done about it?" in re technology patents. Here's what we can do and are doing. Develop new ideas and don't patent them. That's the most any developer can do. How about a conservancy for developers who don't take patents. Get people intellectual credit for their creations to balance the proprietary credit they are not demanding. Lessig is so damned irritating. He says "We've not done anything yet." Arrrrgh. Incorrect. He's not done anything yet. Perhaps his friends haven't done anything yet. Does Dr Lessig understand technology any better than Rep Coble? |
| | First, the antecedent of it. Larry is talking about the successful efforts by the entertainment industry to control the Net, mostly by getting Congress to endlessly expand the scope and terms of copyright law. |
| | Second, by doing something he's talking about fighting the entertainment industry for the hearts and minds of lawmakers, so hideous creations like the DMCA (which was passed unanimously by Congress — led by Howard Coble, by the way — and is shutting down Internet radio, even as we speak) can be reversed. |
| | Here's some of what he's done: |
| | Trained hundreds of lawyers to shark on behalf of the Net, rather than against it. |
| | Written books that have perhaps done more than anything else in print to construcively reframe arguments about copyright and patent law in respect to the Net. |
| | Worked with the EFF to fight the entertainment industry directly. This includes strategies like the Consensus at Lawyerpoint weblog, which has kicked the legs out from under the umpty-million dollar campaign by the entertainment/consumer electronics cartel to exclude everything but consumption from the range of choices open to anybody at the receiving end of digital television. |
| | Led the development of Creative Commons, which gives creators of digital goods a whole new range of licensing choices, while enormously substantiating the concept of the Net as a commons for all of us (rather than as a vast plumbing system for "content" or a patchwork of real estate holdings by the entertainment cartels, each guarded by punishing laws and "no trespassing" signs). |
| | Led the Eldred v. Ashcroft case all the way to the Supreme Court, before which he will argue the case personally in October. |
| | All that said, I have to say that I bristled during the speech when Larry switched voices from the fist person plural we to the second person singular you: |
| | Now, I've spent two years talking to you. To us. About this. And we've not done anything yet. A lot of energy building sites and blogs and Slashdot stories. [But] nothing yet to change that vision in Washington. Because we hate Washington, right? Who would waste his time in Washington? |
| | But if you don't do something now, this freedom that you built, that you spend your life coding, this freedom will be taken away. Either by those who see you as a threat, who then invoke the system of law we call patents, or by those who take advantage of the extraordinary expansion of control that the law of copyright now gives them over innovation. Either of these two changes through law will produce a world where your freedom has been taken away. And, If You Can't Fight For Your Freedom . . . You Don't Deserve It. |
| | I bristled for efforts by guys like Jeff Gerhardt and myself for at least trying to get a wrecking ball rolling toward Congressfolk who respect the citizens whose interests they represent less than the entertainment industry whose hegemonies they are are funded to protect. |
| | But given how little any of us have succeeded thus far — including Larry — I'll forgive the broadness of Larry's reproach. |
| | That vision in Washington won't change unless we do something about it. Larry and Dave are both doing their part. And they're both on the same side of this thing, along with everybody else who truly cares about the Net. |
| | We've still got a long way to go. |
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