Mischa Beitz

From the CC Blog: The ever innovative Brooklyn-based singer songwriter Jonathan Coulton has teamed up with Creative Commons to release his greatest hits compilation “JoCo Looks Back” on a 1gb custom Creative Commons jump drive to help support our 2008 campaign. If that weren’t enough, JoCo and CC have also included all of the unmixed audio tracks for every song on the drive. That’s over 700mb of JoCo thing-a-week goodness. Since all of JoCo’s music is released under our Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, this is an incredible opportunity for the public to remix and reuse his fantastic music. Song files are in 320kbps MP3 and unmixed audio tracks are in 256 VBR MP3.

We’ll be offering the drives exclusively at our $50 dollar donation level (and above) until December 31st. Also included are a CreativeCommons.net account, an OpenID identity, and a 2008 campaign sticker.

Jonathan also wrote a wonderful commoner letter speaking on how he, as a musician, uses Creative Commons to support himself and his career. Read it here.

The letter is just about the most moving CC writing I've seen.

A Change Congress supporter writes:"I am a supporter of your Change Congress movement and have followed your work for a long time. I am also an Obama supporter. I am writing to urge you to share your thoughts with your blog readers about what an Obama administration might entail for the Change Congress movement, and whether you think Obama is committed to government reform...."

Great question. I think many of us are so used to disappointment, we're looking for it, and so not even a week after that extraordinary night, many are beginning to wonder what "change" here will really mean?

But I think we need a certain kind of understanding, or patience here. Imagine, by analogy, a loved one has cancer. She decides to get chemo-therapy to deal with the cancer. But on the way to the hospital, imagine she gets hit with a bullet from a drive-by shooting. (Dark, ok, but you'll see the meaning here in a second). Now an ambulance comes and races this gun-shot victim with cancer to the emergency room.

This sad story is a picture of us just now. The "change Washington" rhetoric of this campaign is the analog to the cancer. The financial collapse is the analog of the shooting. And just as with the cancer patient, the collapse is an urgent, immediate problem that must be solved before the more fundamental, long term problem can be addressed.

This means we have to be a bit patient before the more fundamental issue gets addressed. Not that one shouldn't be critical of decisions that will make it more difficult to cure the cancer. But that the lack of an immediate push on that problem is not inconsistent with the design to cure it.

I only hope they recognize that as with the gun-shot, cancer victim, there needs to be essentially two teams thinking about these two different kinds of problems. One focusing immediately on stabilizing the patient. The second on how the stable patient can be treated for the cancer. The skills of the former team are not necessarily the skills of the latter. And if Obama is to be the transformational president he can be, building a strategy around that transformation will be essential.

So a new President means (the chance of a) new Chairman of the FCC. Before he passes, it is timely to begin to reflect a bit upon the chairmanship of the current chairman, Kevin Martin.

A clue that this is an interesting and important chairman is the fact that he's an equal opportunity anger-er -- the left has loved and hated him, the right has loved and hated him. I'm an increasingly strong admirer. His contribution to sensible thinking about infrastructures was established with his taking the lead in imposing network-neutrality-like rules on Comcast. But it is the unanimous decision freeing "white space" spectrum that will, I think, ultimately be the most important. The decision is not only right. It shows a liberation from a rigid and flawed understanding of the best way to maximize the economic value of "spectrum." This clear thinking needs to expand beyond these bands. But it is an important start.

This is a democracy. We win when we persuade people of our ideals. I believe strongly that Proposition 8 is against our ideals. I have so argued. But we have failed to convince the other members of this democracy.

We need to try again. Let us launch, now, a new petition movement. Let us spend a year talking to people who disagree with us. Let us win this battle by persuading the other side. I volunteer to do whatever would help, including traveling to every church or community in this state to make the case for equality. But please, let's not try to win this battle by summoning the Supremes. Even if it is right that this Amendment is contrary to the best interpretation of Equal Protection, let us bring the ideals of Equal Protection to life, by getting people to support them.

From the CC site: Pop star Gwen Stefani and her husband, rocker Gavin Rossdale recently welcomed a baby, Zuma Nesta Rock Rossdale, into the world. Many celebrities contract with a magazine to arrange an exclusive photo session that debuts mother with newborn. But Stefani and Rossdale took a different approach and hired their own photographer and put the photo online for the public under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license, along with some additional terms that allow all print magazines, newspapers, and blogs to use the photo - even commercially, with some restrictions. You can download a high-res version of the photo (and check out the additional terms the photo is available under) at Stefani’s site.

Joe Crimmings Photography

I awoke in New Zealand today to an article in the New Zealand Herald, and I had a strange sense of deja vu. It is still Monday in America. And like the Monday before the 2004 election, and the Monday before the 2000 election, there is enormous confidence among Democrats that we are going to win this.

But as with 2000, and 2004, I have become a bit terrified about where we’ll be Tuesday. For as presented by the New Zealand Herald, however optimistic the static view of the swing states is, the dynamic view — what is the trend — is sobering, to say the least. As this graph shows, only Florida is trending in the right direction. Every other critical state is trending away from Obama.

Now of course, maybe not quickly enough. Of course, the advantages are significant, especially relative to 2004. And of course, McCain would have to move mountains to overcome the enormous machine that the Obama campaign has built.

But here’s the weird deja vu I feel. In 2004, I got on a plane Tuesday to fly to London. When I got on the plane, I watched every pundit, as well as Kerry’s daughter, speak about how all the polls were with Kerry. The “exit polls” indicated a clear Kerry victory. But then when I landed, I sat it utter disbelief in the United lounge at Heathrow, watching the Ohio numbers go against us, and therefore, delivering 4 more years to Bush.

We Democrats have trouble closing the deal. We have trouble continuing the push to the very last moment. We have repeatedly been blindsided by the fact that the other side votes regardless of the expected result, while we’re more contingent — making the effort if it seems necessary, relaxing when it doesn’t.

Please, don’t let this happen again. Please, if you’re an Obama supporter, do absolutely everything you can in the next 24 hours to make sure every single possible Obama vote turns out to vote. Volunteer for a phone bank, or use my.barackobama.com to phone bank from home. And beyond this, do the sort of things that too few of us ever have the courage to do: Express to your friends, and anyone you know, why you want them to support your candidate. Send an email with a personal story, or an argument important to you, to as many people as you can. Apologize for the intrusion, but intrude nonetheless. (How weird is it that engaging people about democratic issues in a democracy is generally viewed as inappropriate). And don’t let up until 8pm Pacific time.

I’m doing this. I’m exhorting you. I’m writing to everyone on my twitter/facebook/indenti.ca/flickr lists. If I can find an smtp server that will let me, I’ll dump an email to as many of my friends as I can telling them they this is so important. And when my plane lands in the US Tuesday morning, I will join my wife (who is running the phone bank in San Francisco), spending the day on the phone). I will mark myself as weird in doing all this, no doubt. But we can all afford this, if only just once in our life.

I understand the other side has their reasons. I respect them, even if I disagree with them. But I am genuinely afraid about what happens to our side if we let this slip away. There is enormous energy and passion among young people for Obama. There is a passion and hope that makes me cry each time I think about it among African Americans, and those who think about and live the discrimination of our past, and present. There is an energy I have never imagined could be behind any politician. I have known for more than a decade that this man is the real deal. And it gives me enormous hope for this democracy that we are about to vote to make him President.

Unless we don’t. Unless we let this slip by, again. Unless we sit in our comfortable cubicle, and let politics be run by the other side.

Don’t do this. Do something this time. Please at least help spread this message. Make sure everyone who could matter here knows what you believe. And don’t stop until the clock runs out.

The Free Software Foundation has released the GNU Free Document License version 1.3. Section 11 of that license now (essentially) permits certain wikis to be relicensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (v3.0) license, so long as the relicensing is completed by August 1, 2009. That means, the Wikipedia community now has the choice to relicense Wikipedia under a Creative Commons license. (Here's the FAQ for the amendment.)

It would be hard to overstate the importance of this change to the Free Culture community. A fundamental flaw in the Free Culture Movement to date is that its most important element -- Wikipedia -- is licensed in a way that makes it incompatible with an enormous range of other content in the Free Culture Movement. One solution to this, of course, would be for everything to move to the FDL. But that license was crafted initially for manuals, and there were a number of technical reasons why it would not work well (and in some cases, at all) for certain important kinds of culture.

This change would now permit interoperability among Free Culture projects, just as the dominance of the GNU GPL enables interoperability among Free Software projects. It thus eliminates an unnecessary and unproductive hinderance to the spread and growth of Free Culture.

Richard Stallman deserves enormous credit for enabling this change to occur. There were some who said RMS would never permit Wikipedia to be relicensed, as it is one of the crown jewels in his movement for freedom. And so it is: like the GNU/Linux operation system, which his movement made possible, Wikipedia was made possible by the architecture of freedom the FDL enabled. One could well understand a lesser man finding any number of excuses for blocking the change.

But here's what Richard said in 2002 in a different context: "If we don’t want to live in a jungle, we must change our attitudes. We must start sending the message that a good citizen is one who cooperates when appropriate...."

Add "good citizen" to the list of praise for this founder of contemporary freedom.

Barack Obama, John McCain, Joe Biden and Sarah Palin all agree on one important thing: After his conviction, Senator Stevens has to go. Sign our Change Congress petition to ask him to resign, and help us, well, Change Congress.

Robert Greenwald and friends put together this extraordinary video for the extraordinary REMIX book launch party in San Francisco, obviously with the intent to demonstrate just how remix can be an extraordinary distortion, because obviously, I don't use the word "extraordinary" so frequently.

As many have, I've been eager to understand the terms of the settlement in the AAP/Authors Guild v. Google case (Google Summary, Actual Settlement). After spending some time studying it, here are my thoughts. (4TR: I was not part of any of these settlement negotiations so all this was news to me).

IMHO, this is a good deal that could be the basis for something really fantastic. The Authors Guild and the American Association of Publishers have settled for terms that will assure greater access to these materials than would have been the case had Google prevailed. Under the agreement, 20% of any work not opting out will be available freely; full access can be purchased for a fee. That secures more access for this class of out-of-print but presumptively-under-copyright works than Google was initially proposing. And as this constitutes up to 75% of the books in the libraries to be scanned, that is hugely important and good. That's good news for Google, and the AAP/Authors Guild, and the public. (My favorable views about the AAP at least are not, of course, reciprocated.)

It is also good news that the settlement does not presume to answer the question about what "fair use" would have allowed. The AAP/AG are clear that they still don't agree with Google's views about "fair use." But this agreement gives the public (and authors) more than what "fair use" would have permitted. That leaves "fair use" as it is, and gives the spread of knowledge more that it would have had.

The hard issue here will be in the details (surprise, surprise). The agreement calls for the creation of a registry to be operated by a nonprofit corporation. That corporation will be governed by a board comprised of publishers and "authors" (meaning authors participating in the law suit). That corporation will administer the payments to authors and publishers that flow from the agreement. It will also administer a registry that will make it easier for works to be identified, and owners located.

The hard question for the registry is how far they will go to support the range of business models that authors and publishers might have. E.g., Yale Press "Books Unbound" and Bloomsbury Academic both have Creative Commons licensed authors. Will the registry enable that fact to be recognized? Indeed, though the comment was made by someone from the plaintiffs' side that it would be "perverse" for authors to choose free licensing, it is perfectly plausible that an author would choose to make his or her work available freely electronically, but contract with one commercial publisher to deal with selling the physical book, or licensing rights commercially. That, again, is the Bloomsbury Academic business model. Ideally, this non-profit should encourage the widest range of rights-respecting business models. One clear signal about what kind of organization this is will come from this.

But key to the good in the agreement is that we don't have to trust the nonprofit to do good here. Google has committed both to making the data it can control (not private data about telephone numbers and contact info, but public data about copyright registration, terms, etc.) nonexclusively available, and more importantly, downloadable by anyone who wants to build a competing and complementary database. It has also reserved important safe-harbors for its incredibly valuable public domain collection (which includes books people get free access to, and can download for free).

Here, too, however, there is an important challenge for Google. It has provided important value by making available works that have no rights attached to it. But it should do more to make available works that have some rights attached to it. Critical for evaluating whether the long term interest of Google is GOOd or GOOey, Google needs to build into its architecture assets that are licensed freely, or under noncommercial terms, to complement the assets that it claims are free for "noncommercial" download (namely, the public domain works it has). Acting to clearly support the non-proprietary movement as well as the proprietary is an important way for it to show that it stands in the middle, and that it, with the AAP/Authors Guild, have now done some real good.

The biggest loser in this whole battle is the Orphan Works legislation. If anyone needed evidence to demonstrate that it is WAY TOO EARLY for Congress to be passing massive new bureaucratic overlays to copyright to deal with the important problem of "orphan works," this is the evidence. Let's let this private alternative develop, while Congress puts away its billion-factor balancing tests for regulating access to "orphan works." For earlier rants against the Orphan Works bill, see:

Copyright Policy: Orphan Works Reform

Internet Law: 2.5 done (round II on Orphans)

And here's a video I did years ago against the original Orphan Works proposals.

And a video I did long ago about whether Google's use was "fair use."

A powerful and good read.

Proposition 8 is the CA initiative to amend the CA constitution to ban same-sex marriage. This is far from my usual field, but it is an issue I feel strongly about. Click for 8 minutes of a diversion on 8.

Spencer asks for a review of his review. I'll reply to one part: the suggestion that the work is "a derivative essay that rehashes a lot of his older work." That would be true if the book were, as he describes it, about "curtailing creativity, innovation, and even some of our most basic freedoms." But he didn't get that from this book. He got it from Free Culture. As I describe in the preface to this book: "In the past, I’ve tried to advance this view for peace by focusing on the costs of this war to innovation, to creativity, and, ultimately, to freedom. My aim in The Future of Ideas was to defend industries that never get born for fear of the insane liability that the current regime of copyright imposes. My subject in Free Culture was the forms of creative expression and freedom that get trampled by the extremism of defending a regime of copyright built for a radically different technological age.

But I finished Free Culture just as my first child was born. And in the four years since, my focus, or fears, about this war have changed. I don’t doubt the concerns I had about innovation, creativity, and freedom. But they don’t keep me awake anymore. Now I worry about the effect this war is having upon our kids. What is this war doing to them? Whom is it making them? How is it changing how they think about normal, right-thinking behavior? What does it mean to a society when a whole generation is raised as criminals?"

This wasn't a focus in Free Culture. It was a passing thought. It is now the frame for Remix, the motivation for trying to place in the center the good that this net might offer, as a bribe to get policy makers (aka, citizens) to stop this hopeless war, and sue for peace.

That's one focus (and new) at the core of the book. The second is the idea of "remix." Remix, unlike Free Culture, is focused on a particular kind of creativity. I hadn't recognized, or even thought carefully, about this creativity when I wrote Free Culture. But the Sousa quote I've referred to again and again (railing against "talking machines," he observes "we will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cords will be eliminated by a process of evolution was was the tail of man when he came from the ape.") got me to think about the importance of "democratic creativity" -- meaning a kind of creativity that ordinary people engage just like the professionals. This focus on the amateur vs. the professional of course is a theme of others -- Benkler, most importantly. But I liked the way it explained something about how creativity was different in he 20th century from every other century, including the 21st.

That's the second idea of the book. Again, not at the core, or even made in passing in Free Culture. (Indeed, the only time Sousa appears in Free Culture, he's demanding money.)

The third idea is the one Spencer's review focuses on -- the emergence of what I call the "hybrid" -- and here Spencer has nice words. Although this section borrows heavily from the work of others, including The Long Tail by Chris Anderson and Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, Lessig breaks new ground.That passage made me happy. Because I was inspired by Chris and Don/Anthony (and Benkler). But I am happy that even in an otherwise critical review, it's clear that this part "breaks new ground."

These are three ideas, or frames, that move Remix beyond Free Culture. Different points, not "rehashing" of old. Is it "derivative"? Well, of course, it is the thought that I currently have about a subject I've been working on for a decade, deriving from thoughts I had before. But I had thought — I had hoped — the new added something to the old. These three things frame the new.

Finally, Spencer criticizes my 35 pages of prescription at the end. Most annoying, he devotes only the last 35 pages of the book to his reform plan, and some of those ideas are not even that new. Better, he suggests, would have been if I had "used Remix to tell the story of his Creative Commons."

I'll leave it to others to tell the story of Creative Commons. Understanding requires a less self-interested source. But I'm not sure I get what's "annoying" about the 35 pages. I'm not sure how "new" the suggestions are. I'm more concerned with whether they're true.

Spencer seems upset that he has heard versions of them before (because the proposals I advance in fact are not the proposals I had advanced before). I guess I'm not convinced of the fairness of that annoyance. This is a second book on the culture issues. The things I believed in book one I still believe in book two. Sure, it would have been more interesting had I come to believe completely different things. ("Wait a minute. Valenti is right. What was I thinking!") But I didn't. I still think the copyright system regulates too much. I still believe social resources should be devoted differently. I believe even more now in the "humility" that law needs.

Though there are things that remain the same, I wrote Remix because the work of many others had helped me see important parts of this debate differently. Most importantly, the good, the optimistic, the promising parts. Remix and hybrids: they give us yet another reason to end this war.

But enough. I've said this book was essentially finished a year ago. I've moved on to different work. And "you won't have [Free Culture Lessig] to kick around any more, gentlemen, because this is my last [free culture book]." (And see, if I were 15, and had any real talent, I would have taken Nixon's press conference, superimposed my face on Nixon's, added some Gil or NIN music, or whatever.)

It was a tough morning swallowing Spencer's review. My reaction was -- "really, that's what you see in the book?!" None of the key points that made it worth my writing the book were visible to him (or at least, as evinced by the review). And that, frankly, was astonishing, and astonishingly depressing.

But it is the end of the day (here in Hong Kong), and with it comes a review by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, that is actually about the stuff in this book that is what the book's about, and new (and of course, as I think, important). What the book "is" of course is hard to say. But her review is actually a review of the book I thought I wrote.

Most amazing fact of the day however: I posted a Flickr image of the cover of the book to distract from the Spencer review. I didn't know the photographer, and certainly didn't know where she was from. I'm not even quite sure how I even came across the image. But after my talk here in Hong Kong, she came up to me. She had seen the image on my blog.

by laihiu at Flickr

Spence Ante didn't like Remix.But Remix is Lessig's weakest effort to date, a derivative essay that rehashes a lot of his older work. Like Martin Scorsese doing another mobster flick, Lessig seems uninspired, groping for a fresh take on familiar themes. Most annoying, he devotes only the last 35 pages of the book to his reform plan, and some of those ideas are not even that new. But he does give me a chance to share this beautiful picture from laihiu.

The Guardian gave me an editorial today: In Praise of ... Lawrence Lessig.