Lessig

Jerry Lawson has a great piece for lawyers about weblogs, or bLAWgs as I've seen them referred to.

The W3C has taken an extremely important step. The step was taken in the context of patent policy. The substance of the step is important enough: W3C has taken the position that it will not recommend a standard that depends upon a patent that is not offered on a Royalty-Free basis. Some wanted a stronger position -- no patents at all. But the W3C position will at least assure that Web standards will not be blocked by patents.

But the more important decision is the procedure taken in releasing this decision: W3C has released its public version of the decision with the reasoning behind the direcor's action attached. Danny Weitzner reports this is a first. I don't know of any example to contradict that claim. Let it be the first of many from this important organization that continues the work of the web's founder.

Stanford is hosting this year's iLaw program -- a program begun by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. It is the third American edition of the course (we've given it twice overseas as well -- once in Singapore, and this March in Brazil), and it is getting, imho, quite good. The class is always a mix of lawyers, government officials, technologists, and others, always from across the world.

If you're interested, check it out here.

I got a surprising number of replies to my post about online banks. Bank of America has the most loyal customers by far, with 2.5x the number of positive responses over the next highest rank. Second place was tied between USAA and Citibank. Wells Fargo, HSBC, American Express and eTrade also got strong recommendations.

PC Banker got a particularly strong recommendation from someone I know who apparently has a very interesting passion researching such questions. And First Internet Bank of Indiana got a similarly strong set of recommendations.

There were also a surprising number of missives about the value of local credit unions (indeed, adding them together, credit unions were also tied in second place). I am a member of the Stanford Federal Credit Union, but it has discontinued its online access with Quicken.

The most surprising response, however, came from Citibank itself. On the day I posted the question, a very kind manager at Citibank called to tell me he had been reading my webpage (!). Within a day, all problems with my account at Citibank had been corrected, and my account is live. I didn't quite know how to respond to this, but I count this as extra effort by Citibank, and so I'll give them a try. More when there's something useful to report.

Meanwhile, on the power of blogs...

Andy Orlowski has an interesting dump on blogs in the Register. But he also makes an interesting mistake.

I'm not sure how one could ever say what the impact of "blogs" is universally. Yet by asking the question like that, you miss important differences in different countries. Joi's "Emergent Democracy" stuff might seem odd from the perspective of England or the United States (because we of course have such healthy democracies, and soon we'll have three media companies to tell us so); but within the structures of Japan, this channel becomes very significant. Likewise with the equivalent effect (though not through blogs) that has yet to be understood in the Korean election.

The link to teenage girls is even more mysterious, and yet to be understood. The other extraordinarily significant movement in Japan -- dojinshi comics -- is also said to have been sparked by teenage girls. That movement now gathers over 400,000 people twice a year to trade in those comics. And Sifry's estimated number of blogs: 400,000.

Just a coincidence? Who are we to say?

There's an important story about the Korean election that is not well understood by many, including me. I have read all sorts of accounts, but none really seems to capture it. David Moynihan tells an interesting part of the story in a comment to my post on "girrrl revolutions." That suggested the idea of a community-telling.

So here's the question: There was a surprising effect produced by the youth in the last Korean election -- surprising because the pollsters missed it -- and that surprise was in part facilitated by technology. But what's the real story?

Advanced warning: I intend to be an editor of this community-telling, so off topic and unhelpful posts will be removed.

Evan Hunt has a long-ish post about ways to understand environmentalism, both for tangible and intangible resources. As he writes, protecting the commons is about making sure that in the future "you won't have to be rich to breathe fresh air" -- or work for a major studio to be free to build upon our past with film. I love work that pulls together different fields into a common frame. This does it nicely.

Lawrence Solum and Minn Chung have a comprehensive and powerful view of layers in network architecture, nicely linking that architecture to policy implications, in particular, how governments regulate.

I wrote this piece for CIO Insight, arguing that companies ought to let customers spy on their customer service agents. But I wonder: When you get a recording while on hold that says, "Calls may be monitored to assure quality assurance," doesn't the passive voice already authorize you, the customer, to tape as well?

"What you don't understand, Lessig, is that your bullshit 'open' or 'free' types will never -- NEVER -- be able to compete with corporate organization. Squabbles-about-egos-pretending-to-be-about-the-merits can never be quashed. There is no one to say 'enough, let's move on.' So every great idea that your type creates, we'll just wait, watch, and then take. Always." paraphrased from a conversation with someone from within one of the (how many are there?) largest proprietary code companies

Aaron has been trying to prove this skeptic wrong. See his plea and proposal here. I know from email early on that Dave too has the desire that progress be made. Let this be the proof that the skeptic is wrong.

I've had so many exchanges in email and offline about the role the Internet is playing in this election, and I continue to be struck by the will of many to believe that it matters not at all.

But let's remember this: We're about to see an amazing shift in passion and attention in this Democratic Primary. To those who insist the Internet matters not at all, what explains this?

The issue is not how many people you have on your mailing list; the issue is how many are writing and persuading and building a community around your candidacy. One candidate has done that bettter than anyone else. Congratulations, Governor. Whether or not this is how campaigns should be run, it is exactly how elections should be won.

A great petition of artists is speaking back at the RIAA. Congratulations.

So the legislative fight against spam is going no where. There will probably be a bill, but it has been designed simply to make sure that large traditional companies are still free to send unsolicited commercial email. Senator McCain has added a nice innovation that will make it easier to hold people responsible for UCE. But the concerted effort to avoid labeling will mean in the end, the legislation does not work.

Which has led me to a bit of code which I had intended to resist: challenge-response. My mail now goes through Mailblocks.com (which annoyingly has a pop-up to warn people away from any browser except Microsoft's, and which even more annoyingly is enforcing patent protection against other challenge response systems) but so far, it has worked.

"Worked." "Worked" means I don't have literally hundreds of emails in my inbox each morning that are junk. "Worked" means I don't therefore have to delete 95% of the emails in my inbox because they are junk. "Worked" means I therefore don't erase emails which were not junk but which one inevitably will when so much is junk.

But "worked" also means that the first time you (humans out there, not bots) send me email, you've got to go through a web-based ritual to authenticate that you're human. Of all the mandated authentication our society requires these days, this seems about the most harmless. Indeed, it might even help.

So a bunch of people in San Francisco (with Brewster Kahle, who's behind all great ideas behind it) are building a free wireless network for the city, called sflan. My wife's and my house is to be sflan16, and last weekend the team came to the house to install the antenna.

Our house has just undergone major renovations (a 9 month project which is 6 months late; the other 9 month project is humming along just fine with eta 2 weeks), and we included in those renovations a conduit from the roof to a server room in the basement.

But when we tried to run the Ethernet cable from the roof to the basement, we discovered that the conduit makes 3 90-degree turns and one 45-degree turn, and it was not at all clear how one pushes a cable through such a maze.

So of course we turned first to the internet. I typed in a totally natural language question into Google (which I find these days is increasingly the best method): something like "how do you thread a cable through a long conduit with 90 degree angles." The first post that came up was a thread from some list titled Threading fiber through a long conduit. This thread reported no good luck, but it had the kernel of an idea: a vacuum cleaner.

So we took a bit of foam, tied it to the end of a roll of kite string, and connected a small Shop-Vac at the other end of the conduit (which is at least 50 feet long). Bingo. The key, it seems, is to have a big but light obstruction, and google at hand.

Chairman Powell will receive another letter that he will rather not have received. This one is from Congressman Kind and Boucher, calling on the Chairman to preserve neutrality on the Internet. It's not quite 700,000 letters (yet, at least), but this campaign does have the support of a large number of interests, including a few large companies (Microsoft, Amazon, and Disney, if it would only have the courage to stand up to the cable companies).

Tim Wu and I filed an Ex Parte with the FCC on this. Stay tuned for more.

Dave Winer has remixed the "code is law" meme. Nicely, unsurprisingly.

I've been experimenting with Apple's mail client, "Mail" (note to product development: generic names make it very hard to search on product specific information), and have been frustrated that an obvious function is not in Mail (or any other client I've seen).

The obvious function is the ability to define a hot key that will move a message to a specified folder. I had built (and had built) tools in Entourage to enable me to hit, say, ctrl+f, and the highlighted message(s) would be moved to the friends folder. I know you mice-on-the-brain sorts like to do that with the (insanely inefficient) drag function, but I like keys.

Anyway, I asked coder Jonathan Nathan whether he could help me out on this, and he put together a couple cool little Applescripts that get close. (He's GPL'd them here).

The hard coded version lets you code in the name of a folder. The variable gives you a list of folders to toggle through. Both require a keyboard utility to invoke the script. And both face a similar problem: Sometimes the utility will "forget" which message is highlighted so it forgets which message to highlight next.

Both problems come from the relatively immature stage of development that "Mail" is in. Interestingly, in MS Entourage you could invoke a script from the keyboard without a utility, and it had no problem remembering where it was on list of messages. (It's also relatively easy to find information about "Entourage" on the web.)

Thanks to Jonathan Nathan for his free (as in beer and as in speech) code. Any ideas to tweak it would be appreciated.

Using machines to coordinate sharing content -- that's what this site is doing. And what they are doing is totally legal. Yet if the machines actually copied the content they shared, what they are doing would be a felony (according to some in the content industry). Does this trigger make sense?

Jim Garrison writes to report the launch of a project that uses my three favorite things (THINGS): free software, Creative Commons licenses, and RDF. Gnomoradio.org will "create an online network where artists can promote and share their music freely and willingly." As its announcement explains, it is built on gpl'd software, and gives artists the ability to generate "an Internet address (a URL) that will point to information about the song, a machine-readable license, a method of verifying the downloaded song, a link to the artist's web site, and information about purchasing any available recordings of the song." More discussion.

Let free compete with controlled, and let's see who wins.

Thanks to Timo Hannay for pointing me to a reason to hope about WIPO. While he sees this as hypocrisy, I see it as a good news: regardless of its unwillingness to hold a meeting about the value of "open collaborative models for producing public goods," within WIPO itself, open source and free software lives.

Check out this story published online at Wired before in print about Amazon's amazing new searchable book archive. Amazingly cool.

This brilliant idea from MIT (using the cable network to distribute analog content, and thereby taking advantage of the existing analog blanket licenses covering music) has been in the works for some time. Note that most universities could take advantage of this, as most universities have a blanket license for music distributed on campus. So long as there's an analog link, at least. Or, alternatively, if Congress were to change the law so that digital had the same rights as analog, or perhaps, digital with an analog decay, then bingo, "piracy" at universities would disappear.

Joi writes about a song that Shannon has written for Ben and Mena. (lyrics) (mp3). Brilliantly done. Best of all, unlike "Happy Birthday," because this is under a Creative Commons license, you're free to sing it wherever you want.

Ed Lee was a key lawyer in the Eldred case, and is now a professor at Ohio State. Welcome to blogland, Ed.

Tim Berners-Lee's W3C has filed comments before the USPTO about the burdens of patents. Maybe the FTC's been reading USPTO briefings again?

There's a nice series here.

Julian Dibbell and I taught a class last term about the law in virtual worlds. The part that was most surprising to me was that none of the commercial ventures gave users rights over the content they created -- until now. Second Life by Linden Lab is not only an extraordinarily cool new virtual world. It is also the first commercial virtual world to make it explicit that users own the content they create. As this release describes, a revised TOS "allows subscribers to retain full intellectual property protection for the digital content they create, including characters, clothing, scripts, textures, objects and designs." And, if this wasn't cool enough, Second Life has also "committed to exploring technologies to make it easy for creators to license their content under Creative Commons licenses."

Creative Commons has had an iCommons project for sometime now. I guess now we'll have to begin the vCommons project.

So my brand is supposed to be pessimism, but I'll confess that since young Mr. Willem began to smile, it is becoming very hard for me to stick to brand. And now there is this news about Dave and Mark Pilgrim collaborating about standards. That is indeed wonderful news.

So I hate spam (and of course I don't mean the product by the Hormel company which has been cool enough to let the world use this word without launching a war against the use of its trademarked name), and I've been pushing bounties as one essential part of any real solution. Congress, the world is slowly coming to see, has no interest in a real solution -- at least after the marketers were finished them. But I am encouraged that Microsoft has launched a bounty campaign against virus makers. That's a much harder tracing to make, though they've offered lots more money than a spam bounty would require.

Meanwhile, this is a great story about a sort of vigilante
action against the most infamous of spammers. Bravo.

Reed Hundt, former chairman of the FCC, and force of good in many of the debates that live on these pages, has a great piece about the battle over Voice-over-IP in the FCC.

I've got a piece in Wired about the push to shift ownership of networks back to customers. It build on the work of Alan McAdams and the IEEE to accelerate broadband deployment in the US. For a great collection of papers related to this, see this . The Burlington, VT, story is told here. And the Utopia project in Salt Lake City is another great example of this.

Dave Winer spoke at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society's lunchtime series. The talk will be archived here soon. There was a great turn-out keen to learn from the master, and the master taught well -- mixing genuine and useful insight with an idealism that is too rare around here.

Law students begin life as idealists, and there's an obvious and powerful idealism in the Winer's arguments. I'll point to my favorite parts when the talk is posted. Meanwhile, I was happy to tell him that the Center will be copying his experiment at Harvard next fall, and offering a blog for every entering student in the law school. Turow's One L, or even Alex Wellen's Barman will be nothing in comparison.

Groklaw has a page devoted to SCO.

As everyone should know, one of the coolest things on the net is Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive, and in particular, his Way Back Machine. The Archive has been collecting copies of the Internet since 1996 (except for those parts excluded either expressly or through a robots.txt file). Using the Way Back Machine, you can see how a web page has changed over time.

As many have noted, the Way Back Machine helps correct one particularly Orwellian feature (bug) of the net -- that it has no memory. You can go back to a web page, and not know it has been changed. And recently, Brewster captured a particularly rich example of this airbrushing of digital code.

On May 1, 2003, the Whitehouse's Office of the Press Secretary released this press release, announcing "President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended." But then, with airbrush magic, now the same press release has been changed to this, which reports "President Bush Announces Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended." No update on the page, no indication of when the change occurred, indeed, no indication that any change occurred at all. Instead, there is robots.txt file disallowing all sorts of activities that might verify the government. (Why does any government agency believe it has the power to post a robots.txt file?)

Why would you need to check up on the Whitehouse, you might ask? Who would be so unAmerican as to doubt the veracity of the Press Office? Great question for these queered times. And if you obey the code of the robots.txt file, you'll never need to worry.

Ok, so here's a device that would be very cool. Net, please invent it.

90% of hotels with broadband have wired, not wireless, broadband. That means you must sit at the stupid desk and work when everyone knows, the best place to work is sitting in bed.

So here's what's needed: A device the size of a silver dollar with two ports. One you plug into your computer; the other into the broadband outlet. You configure your connection through the hotel broadband line, and then unplug your computer. The device is then a wireless bridge. Because it would only be broadcasting in the room, its power would be very low. But the key would be ease of configuration and size.

Does this exist?

So a friend writes, "so why isn't mail.app better integrated into iCal? Why isn't there a script to turn a message into a iCal event or task? There are two tries floating around out there, but nothing that works."

Good question.

More from Nathan: "ccRdf is a set of Python classes which (hopefully) allow developers to easily parse and manipulate Creative Commons licensing metadata."

Go to Dropload and drop a load of bites with an email address, and it sends an email to the recipient to come pick up the load. Free and free of the limitations of email servers.

I've already plugged EFF as a worthy target of support. Here's another easy and very worthy group: the folks at Wikipedia. As you (should) know, Wikipedia has built an extraordinary free content encyclopedia. They're now in real financial need. Please help if you can.

So months after wondering what this integrated "Rip, Mix, Burn" technology in OS X is all about, I finally got around to making a movie -- Mr. Willem's First Christmas. It was astonishingly easy to make. It took a couple hours of shooting with a Sony DV Cam, and then a couple hours editing. Sound directly integrates with iTunes. Photos directly integrate with iPhoto. And the result directly integrates with iDVD. All that's missing is a simple way to integrate Creative Commons licenses, the way, e.g., MT does, and Adobe will (as announced at our party, at which the latest cool Flash! was shown as well).

So after my parents saw the iMovie I made on the Mac, I was able to convince my Dad to return the Dell he had just bought my Mom, and buy an iMac instead. On Christmas, then, I went to the Apple Store site, and in 5 minutes was able to buy an iMac. On Saturday (two days later), the computer arrived.

The finalists for MoveOn.org's Bush in 30 Seconds ad contest are in. 1,000 entries. 15 amazing finalists.

Apple's latest, Garageband is a music editing tool. The tool offers some (royalty) free music, and the ability to publish the creativity you produce. CC-less, so far.

Dave points to a great "citizen-blogger." Perfect, but we need many more.

MoveOn's Bush-in-30-Second campaign has announced its winners. They are in four categories, and each is brilliantly done. I hope the same is done by the other side, when the Democrats finally find a candidate. Because what's great about this is that it marks the real beginning of iPolitics -- bottom-up media made real. Citizen-bloggers and digital media -- when Madison finally returns to "Madison Avenue."

I understand that RNC is confused about the nature of this campaign. No doubt the folks responsible for the