Copyrighteous

I roll my eyes a little when I think that Unhappy Birthday is the document I have written that has been read by the most people. The page -- basically a website encouraging people to rat on their friends for copyright violation for singing Happy Birthday in public -- has received millions of page views and has generated tons of its own media (including a rather memorable interview of CBC's WireTap). At the bottom of the page I am listed, by name and email, as the "copyrighteous spokesman" for the initiative.

And since the page has been online, I have received hate mail about it. Constantly.

Since the email only goes to me, I thought it might be fun to share some of these publicly. All these messages are quoted verbatim but I have not included the senders' names. Be warned: the language is often salty.

This email is years old now but it is probably still my favorite:

Atrocity and strife run rampant in this world.

Babies are abandoned in dumpsters. Teachers molest students. Impoverished Indonesians make sneakers for pennies while the spoiled jackhole in the 30-second commercial makes millions for sinking a three-pointer and smirking at the camera. Forms of religion are interpreted as to compel people to strap explosives to their chest and board buses full of innocents. Boss Tweeds embezzle and get severance pay while John Q. Workingman gets put out on the street when the corporation goes belly up.

Out of all these indignities and countless others I haven't the time to mention, why do you make it your personal crusade to assist in the flagrant persecution of family restaurants for partaking in the time-honored tradition of singing "Happy Birthday"? God forbid these foul brigands bend copyright law in order to bring a smile to somebody's face.

Food for thought...without the accompanying song.

Many others strike a defiant, if less poetic, tone:

Good luck! There are millions of us who refuse to accept the ridiculous "copyright" on Happy Birthday. If Time Warner were an ethical company rather than a greedy megacorp they would do something truly special and release it into the public domain.

There are some things in this world more important than money.

Quite a few people notice that my last name is Hill and suspect that I must be related to the Hill sisters who originally penned the song. I'm not, to my knowledge, although since Time Warner bought the rights, it's not clear it would matter:

I am writing to just let you know how disappointed I am that a large corporation and others (like the HILL family) are making $2 million plus for a song that was created over 100 years ago with noone knowing who created the lyrics! None of us at our place of employment could believe this and we certainly won't encourage people to send money to ASCAP. It is a shame that ASCAP license fees aren't used to pay more to up-and-coming artists who I'm sure need this money alot more than Time Warner.

We all plan to sing Happy Birthday MORE now in public places and if anyone asks if it is copyrighted we will say "of course not". Maybe this way the song will not die out completely as more and more other "birthday" songs are being sung. It would also be nice if your website cited whose opinion is writing the piece and your obvious conflict of interest.

Or another:

Is it a coincidence that your last name is the same as the last name of the authors of the song "Happy Birthday?" You seem to have a personal monetary motive for your work with the "grassroots project" you call Unhappy Birthday, and if you do not, your concern is misplaced all the same. Whom do you imagine your campaign serves? And do you realize whom it harms?

I do not question the illegality of performing the copyrighted song publicly. And you are correct that most of the public is not even aware that the song is under copyright. I think the harm done to Time Warner and its associates by such public performances is far outweighed by the joy created when the much-loved happy tune is shared.

I urge you to ask yourself why you think the immortal Hill sisters wrote the song in the first place. It was not to put more money Time Warner's pocket. It was, I would argue, for the sake of the song itself and the happiness it brings when performed (publicly or otherwise). Please consider siding with the children and the artists; let the lawsuits alone.

Some people suspect the site may be satire, but include insults and and attacks just in case it isn't:

I'm trying to figure out if your Unhappy Birthday site is meant to be in jest. If so Rofl, and congrats on a hilarious site. If you're actually serious, then fuck you Nazi cunts and your corporate butt buddies. Thank you for your time.

Or these two alternatives (each were separate emails):

If this is a joke then it's rather funny. However if this website is serious then you're a fucking idiot. Get a life!!!!

if it is a form of protest, then THANK YOU! if it is not, then screw you all!

One memorable piece of mail was from someone who knew of me from my activities in the free software and free culture communities and had a hard time reconciling my work there with the high protectionist website:

I was quiet surprised to see your name and email address at the bottom of the home page of the site Unhappy Birthday. The site claims that you are their spokesman.

Is this correct? I do not understand... You have all this Open Source/ Free Software background and then this site that defends one of the most controversial copyright issues???

Do you really mean this? Do you want to help Time Warner?

I've also received probably half a dozen mails that offer some sort of support! For example, this person liked the website -- and even wanted to buy one of our t-shirts -- but objected to our logo:

I was going to buy one of your products from your Unhappy Birthday Shop at CafePress but there's a problem.

I hate emblems that uses human skulls in them.

Being a member of ASCAP I really do support your cause but I can't buy a product that I would never wear.

And many people are simply confused asking something like this one:

So I saw the unhappy birthday site and I'm just a little confused. Is this a joke or a serious thing?

I usually reply and explain that I have tried to ensure that the site describes the legal situation around Happy Birthday honestly and correctly.

That said, the vast majority of messages I receive are unequivocal. Like this email that I received last week addressed to "you anti-free speech fascists":

         __
        /  \
        |  |
        |  |
        |  |
 __  __ |  | __
/  \/  \|  |/  \
|               \
|                |
|                /
|                \
|                 /
\                /
 |              |
 |              |

Half an hour later, the author followed up with a English version of the same message, set to the tune of happy birthday.

You might think that getting insulted and flipped off by confused people on the Internet might get me down. It doesn't! I made Unhappy Birthday because I thought that the fact that something as important to our culture as Happy Birthday could be owned was outrageous. Every piece of hate mail means that somebody else -- almost always somebody who isn't a "copyfighter" or a free culture geek -- is now upset about the current state of copyright too.

Sure, Unhappy Birthday makes me a tiny bit sad about people's ability to recognize satire. But it makes me really happy about people's ability to get very annoyed at what they think is the outrageous control of our culture through copyright. When more people are as mad as the the people I've quoted above, we will be able to change copyright into something less outrageous to all of us.

When talking about free culture or free software, many people suggest that they would love to support free models, but that they don't see how to make it all work. Until they have an alternate model in front of them, they cannot bring themselves to argue for a more ethical alternative. I disagree with this approach. Instead, I say, "this is the world I want to live in and, even though I don't know exactly how to get to there from here, I'm going to refuse to settle for anything short of this ideal." Most people dismiss such thinking as "impractical" and "unrealistic." I think most people are being unimaginative.

Robot jockeys are one recent illustrative reason, among many, that I feel comfortable taking this position. Some background is necessary for those that are unfamiliar with the example. A decade ago, several Gulf emirates used thousands of young boys from Sudan and South Asia as jockeys for camel racing. Human rights groups campaigned against the practice and suggested that these boys were at sometimes held as slaves and intentionally underfed to keep their weight low. Despite criticism, camel racers resisted moving away from young boys as jockeys. If they moved to heavier adults instead of young boys, they reasoned, the camels would be much slower. Of course, they were right. But they were being unimaginative in the alternatives they were considering.

As the young jockeys became a increasingly unjustifiable public relations disaster for the states that supported it, law-makers in several Gulf states gave in to calls from UNICEF and others and created laws to outlaw the practice. Within three years of UAE passing strict laws against child jockeys, Swiss engineers, funded by racers desperate for an alternative, had created the first robotic camel jockey. Within several years these jockeys were lighter, cheaper, more responsive to the owner, and well on their way to being more effective than any young boy. When forced, by law and by an ethical prerogative, to come up with an alternative to young boys, racers created a solution that was superior, along nearly every axis, to the system they had fought to keep.

Although the costs to society of proprietary software cannot be compared to slavery and abuse, the basic same pattern of solution-seeking can be seen in the example of free software. Early free software advocates suggested that most programmers would likely need to take a paycut. As it turned out, vibrant and successful economic models to support free software have supported a large and growing free software industry. But we have free software business models only because a small group of principled individuals refused to settle for what they knew, came up with creative ethical business models that "just might work," and put their own paychecks on the line to try them out. As open source has shown, some of these creative solutions offered models superior to what we had before. In the world of software development, free software redefined "practical" and "realistic."

One can think of solving human problems as like searching for the highest point in hilly terrain in thick fog. It's easy to get stuck on the top of the first little hill you walk up (i.e., a local maximum) and then conclude you can never do better. If we refuse to compromise and force ourselves to leave that first little hill, chances are pretty good we'll find a "higher" peak.

Of course, it is also possible that we will find the global maximum or the best possible solution to a given problem. In those cases, any change will mean a sacrifice. But when dealing with most most social and legal dilemmas, there are enough variables involved that this seems very unlikely. Indeed, most big problems can be thought of as having many interacting dimensions -- and only some of these will be ethical concerns. In other words, most social problems are more like the problem of child camel jockeys than they are like trying to transcend the laws of physics.

Business models and laws for the regulation of technology and knowledge are extremely complicated human creations. Do we really think we cannot create ethical systems to compensate cultural creators that are at least as good as what we have now? If we never force ourselves to be "impractical" and "unrealistic", we will never find out.

This essay is a summary of my presentation at the workshop Inlaws and Outlaws, held on August 19-20, 2010 in Split, Croatia. The workshop brought together advocates of piracy with participants in the free culture and free software movements.

In Why Software Should Not Have Owners, Richard Stallman explains that, if a friend asks you for a piece of software and the license of the software bars you from sharing, you will have to choose between being a bad friend or violating the license of the software. Stallman suggests that users will have to choose between the lesser of two evils and will choose to violate the license. He emphasizes that it's unfair to ask a user to make such a choice.

Over the past few years, pirate parties have grown across much of the developed world. Of course, piracy remains the primary means of distributing media across most of the rest. Advocates of access to information have gathered and organized under the "pirate" banner, representing the choice of sharing with friends over compliance with license terms.

The free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) and free culture movements seem to have a confused and conflicted reaction to all this. On one hand, major proponents of several pirate parties are FLOSS and free culture stalwarts and several pirate parties have made FLOSS advocacy a component of their political platforms. Pirate Parties' clear opposition to software patents and DRM resonates with both FLOSS and free culture communities. On the other hand, FLOSS leaders, including Stallman, have warned us about "pirate" anti-copyright policies. Free culture leaders, like Lawrence Lessig, have repeatedly and vociferously denounced piracy, treated even the intimation of an association with piracy as an affront, and systematically distanced themselves and their work from piracy.

Should FLOSS and free culture advocates embrace pirates as comrades in arms or condemn them? Must we choose between being either with the pirates or against them? Our communities seem to have no clearly and consistently articulated consensus.

I believe that, unintuitively, if you take a strong principled position in favor of information freedom and distinguish between principles and tactics, a more nuanced "middle ground" response to piracy is possible. In light of a principled belief that users should be able to share information, we can conclude there is nothing ethically wrong with piracy. Licenses have the power of the law but they are protected by unjust "intellectual property" laws. That said, principles are not the only reason activists choose to do things. Many political stunts are bad ideas not because they are wrong, but because they won't work and have negative side effects. Tactics matter too. Even though there might not be anything ethically wrong with piracy from the perspective of free software or free culture, it might still be a bad idea. There are at least three such tactical reasons that might motivate free software and culture to not support piracy or participate in pro-piracy movements and politics.

First, a systematic disrespect for copyright undermines respect for all licenses which have been of a huge tactical benefit to free software and a increasingly important factor in the success of free culture. Copyleft licenses like the GPL or CC BY-SA have power only because copyright does. As Stallman has suggested, anti-copyright actions are anti-copyleft. That needn't be an argument against attempts to limit copyright. Indeed, I think we must limit and reduce copyright. But we must tread carefully. In the current copyright climate, I believe that copyleft offers a net advantage. Why should others respect our licenses if we don't respect theirs? Looking at the long term, we must weigh the benefits of promoting the systematic violation of proprietary licenses with the benefits of adherence to free software and free culture.

Second, piracy is fundamentally reactionary. Part of its resonance as a political symbol comes from the fact that the piracy represents a way that consumers of media can fight back against a set of companies which have attacked them -- with lawsuits, DRM systems, and demonization in propaganda -- for sharing in ways that most consumers think are natural and socially positive. But piracy focuses on reaction rather the fundamental importance of sharing that drives it. As a result, most pirates do not support, or are even familiar with, a principled approach to access to information. As a result, many piracy advocates who speak out against DRM on DVDs will be as happy to use NetFlix to stream DRMed movies for $5 a month as they were to download for free. The best rallying cries do not always translate into be the most robust movements.

Third, through its focus on a reaction, a dialog about piracy avoids engagement with the tough questions of what we will replace the current broken copyright system with. A principled position suggests that it is our ethical prerogative to create alternative models. The free software movement has succeeded because it created such a prerogative and then, slowly over time, provided examples of workable alternatives. A principled position on free software did not require that one provide working new systems immediately, but it makes the development of creative, sustainable approaches a priority. Attacking the system without even trying to speak about alternative modes of production is unsustainable. Free software and free culture call for a revolution. Piracy only calls for a riot.

Piracy, in these three senses, can be seen as tactically unwise, without necessarily being unethical. By taking a principled position, one can go build on, and go beyond, RMS's comment. On free culture and free software's terms, we can suggest that piracy is not ethically wrong, but that it is an unwise way to try to promote sharing. Without being hypocritical, we can say: "I don't think piracy is unethical. But I also do not support it."

About a year ago, I read American Gothic by Steven Biel and the book has left a surprising lasting impression on me. The book describes the background, history, and life of "American Gothic: America's most famous painting" by Grant Wood. Even if you don't recognize the name "American Gothic", you are likely to recognize the picture or the scene. The book is a serious and -- as far as I can tell -- reasonably comprehensive treatment of the subject that is interesting, insightful at points, and a breeze to read.

Of course, the book is not actually about the painting that hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago -- although it will certainly teach you more than you probably ever wanted to know about that painting, its subjects, its settings, etc. The book is really the story of how that paining has been received, understood, and used. Nearly half of the book focuses on examples of people who have remixed, reworked, reimagined, and reproduced the painting in myriad forms, formats, settings, and ways. The book contains scores of photographs of celebrities posing in American Gothic style settings, dozens of political cartoons based on the paintings, images of talk shows, magazine covers, Broadway plays, product advertisements, toys, gifts, kitch, and more, done up in recognizeable representations of the basic American Gothic form. There is a very incomplete of references to American Gothic in popular culture at Wikipedia that can give a tiny taste of what is out there.

The last chapter of the book is devoted to these "parodies" and there's some brief talk of issues around copyright and control of the image. Wood's sister Nan was the owner of the copyright for much of the second half of the twentieth century and is also the woman in the painting. She famously charged several makers of more lurid take-offs with defamation and successfully blocked a number of remixes. In 1988, Nan transferred ownership to the Visual Artists and Galleries Association (VAGA) which will hold the copyright until 2025. VAGA also claims "rights of publicity" in Nan's image which will last until 2060. VAGA takes a very expansive view of its copyright claims and argues that it has both veto power and royalty rights to any recognizably similar work. For example, VAGA does not want the American Gothic image used in alcohol advertisements and has successfully had such ads pulled. Biel's book contains no reference to the amount of money made from licensing the work but one can only conclude that it must be massive. VAGA blocked a plan by Iowa to use the picture on the back of the Iowa state quarter due to licensing disagreements; instead Iowa used a different Wood painting that was clearly in the public domain.

What struck me most about Biel's book is related to just how deeply ingrained in American culture the American Gothic image has become. The book cites simple surveys that show that almost every American recognizes the painting (although only a small fraction know the painting's name or who painted it). The thousands of parodies that the book documents are testament to the fact that the painting has become a way of representing something essential about American culture and its values. But in a strange way, the painting's popularity and incessant reuse has also made it part of the culture that it so effectively captured.

We can think of culture as a set of shared values and references that help us related to each other and to communicate. Just like idioms in language, culture helps us communicate more effectively, certainly, but also lets us communicate messages that would not be communicable otherwise. When Out Magazine, Coors, or any of several dozen others replace the figures in American Gothic with a gay or lesbian couple, they are succinctly sending a message about homosexual relationships and American traditional values that could not be made any other way. In this way, American Gothic -- both the painting and Biel's book -- represent a strong argument for free culture.

If American Society has infused American Gothic with so much value, how can it be fair to let one person or organization own it? Are they not owning an essential mode through which a society can relate, experience, and communicate? I can't help but conclude that it shouldn't matter if VAGA does not like alcohol, advertisements, homosexuality, or wants to make a some money every time someone makes a cartoon parody. These are trivial concerns next to the importance of our society's need to communicate about these issues. If doing so requires the use of a shared cultural reference in VAGA's painting, I find it hard to justify VAGA's position of control.

We need to be able to reproduce and reimagine American Gothic because it has become part of us. It's a striking example of the way that art becomes culture and the reason that truly free culture is the only appropriate response. We can't afford to let our experience of the world and each other -- to let ourselves at a very fundamental level -- be owned and controlled.

Last week, the Free Software Foundation announced an important new initiative called End Software Patents whose goals are pretty evident from the project's name. So far, the initiative is backed by the FSF, the Public Patent Foundation, and the Software Freedom Law Center.

There are several organizations who are taking on specific bad patents but ESP is unique in that it is activitely working toward the abolition of software patents in the United States. While the organization is focused on work in the US, it's deeply important globally -- much of the world's patent law is "exported" from the US.

The FSF is stretching extremely limited resources in backing ESP to help it get off the ground because we believe two things:

• First, software patents are a fundamental threat to free and open source software (but not just to free and open source software). The FSF must oppose software patents because they provide a fundamental threat to free software's continued success. That sounds like hyperbole but is unfortunately not.
• Second, we can win this fight. For a whole set of reasons, the successful abolition of software patents is a goal that, while extremely ambitious, is also within grasp. These issues, of course, are much bigger than free software. Companies spend billions of dollars in litigation over software patents that are not novel and that should not exist. ESP can reach out farther than the FSF alone and build a coalition that can destroy software patents for the good of much more than the free software community.

Please read the new ESP report on the state of software patents written by the ESP Executive Director Ben Klemens to understand why we are optimistic. And please, support ESP financially in this fight. ESP's continued work is not ensured past the immediate future. Your support will help endow a bright future for the next generation of software developers and users.

Yesterday witnessed the most important step forward for the Definition of Free Cultural Works (DFCW) since its adoption and endorsement by the Wikimedia Foundation a year ago.

Although I might have wished things otherwise, Creative Commons is not a social movement fighting for essential freedom or the essential freedoms at the core of the DFCW in particular. From the movement's perspective, CC is more like a law and advocacy firm that works for us -- a very sympathetic one. CC writes, hosts, and supports a variety of licenses. Some are free. Some are not. Last year they took steps to explicitly limit the extent of restrictions they are willing to tolerate in their licenses.

Yet, while CC has resisted taking a stand in favor of the Definition of Free Cultural Works, they continue to produce some of the best free licenses, tools, and metadata available and they seem honestly interested in helping users interested in social movements based around these definitions organize more effectively.

In perhaps its most important move to date in this area, Creative Commons announced yesterday that it was placing a seal on each of its licenses that provide the essential freedoms laid out in the Definition of Free Cultural Works. The seal links to the definition over at freedomdefined.org. In Creative Commons' words:

This seal and approval signals an important delineation between less and more restrictive licenses, one that creators and users of content should be aware of.

A very practical reason users should be aware of these distinctions is that some important projects accept only freely (as defined) licensed or public domain content, in particular Wikipedia and Wikimedia sites, which use the Definition of Free Cultural Works in their licensing guidelines.

The seal is currently on two CC licenses that provide for essential freedom (Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike) and their public domain dedication. Thanks go to Erik Moeller at the Wikimedia Foundation and everyone at Creative Commons to helped make this happen.

SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition -- a large alliance of academic and research libraries and other organizations working on open access scholarly publishing issues -- just recognized me as a SPARC Innovator.

The award/recognition is given semi-annually to honor contributions to the open access movement. I'm being singled out in part for my work on Overpriced Tags and for other OA work and advocacy. I'm sharing the stage with several friends -- all of whom are students active in the Free Culture movement. SPARC seems to see this set of innovator awards as an opportunity to recognize the contributions of the next generation of activists. I'm honored to be counted among them!

An essay I wrote for the Wikimedia Foundation fundraising drive was just published on the the foundation's Why Give blog. The essay, titled Wikimedia and the Free Culture Movement, discusses the movement for free culture, Wikimedia's central role in it, and the importance of supporting the foundation because, I argue, the immediate success of the free culture movement is intimately tied up in Wikimedia's efforts.

It is very exciting to see an essay I wrote linked prominently from the top of every page in Wikipedia! It is also exciting to imagine that I might help the Wikimedia foundation at this important time in that organization's life.

I am giving to two organizations in support of two causes this year: the Wikimedia Foundation in support of free culture and the Free Software Foundation in support of free software. No other two groups are as committed or are doing as much to build a world where knowledge, and the tools we use to use, produce, and communicate it, are and remain free.

Just a couple years ago, music and technology companies would advertise their DRM schemes. While these technologies only served to prevent users of computers and consumer electronics devices from doing things, the media and technologies companies tried to spin it positively. Think of all the wonderful media that the music, film, and publishing industries will be willing to distribute to you at the click of a button, they said. All they asked for in return is the keys to your computer and the legal right to attack and sue you if you try to take control.

As everyone who purchased iTunes music and made the mistake of buying a non-Apple DAP incapable of reading Apple DRMed music knows, DRM is a bad deal for consumers. Users are always better off with an unencumbered media file. In all the excitement over major label content, some consumers didn't see this immediately.

With time though, the inconvenience of a computer that does the Apple and the RIAA wants over what you want hit home. This, combined with activist projects like the FSF's Defective By Design, have turned the tide. The DRM label that used to be a badge of honor is now a stigma that smart companies are going out of their way to avoid.

This past weekend, I saw this flier from Calabash Music in the crepe store across the street:

The store served a general, non-technical audience. DRM-FREE, it turns out, is a good way to sell music. Not just to geeks but to any consumer who has been stymied unfairly by DRM or knows someone who has. That, it turns out, is a whole lot people. Consumers know what DRM is and they know don't like it.

As consumers learn more about DRM, they want to avoid it. Seeing this, the companies that produce DRM are looking for ways to escape. The Apple/EMI deal seems to be an attempt to protect market share that the use of DRM is threatening. Others, like HBO's Bob Zitter, are disingenuously attempting to escape the stigma of DRM by simply rebranding the technology.

Of course, DRM suffers from a much more fundemental problem than bad branding. The problem with DRM is that consumers don't like what it does and are only sometimes willing to suffer through it when not given the choice. Increasingly often, as with in the example of the flier I found, consumers have a choice. Things don't look good for DRM. For DRM opponents, the self-defeating nature of the technology is our greatest ally.

At the Free Culture National Conference a few weeks ago, Kevin Driscoll initiated a project that I feel is hugely important: he's prompted the free culture community to state and share their vision.

While I've talked a lot about definitions in the past, I probably should have been talking about goals or vision. Kevin has created an important opportunity for all free culture stakeholders to step back and imagine what the world will look like when we win. By doing so, we end up defining a set of implicit goals for our social movement and can then set to work on the hard part: figuring out how we get there.

With thanks to Eben Moglen for much of the inspiration, here's mine:

People remembered that there is no scarcity in information goods except where they have created it. As evidence grew of the positive effects of free culture and the toll of information ownership, our communities decided that we were not well served by limits on the flow and development of knowledge.

Accordingly, the gatekeepers and tax collectors for culture have withered away and were dismantled. We -- the consumers, creators, and re-creators -- have offered new, more ethical business models, have engaged in new methods of distribution, and have produced creative goods.

Today, access to information is a simple matter of connecting someone to a network and a community: a technical problem that we know how to solve. Nobody pays for the "right" to hear music, read a book, watch a movie, or use a piece of software. Nobody is forced to choose between being a bad neighbor or friend and breaking copyright law. No artist, musician, or author sells a million copies of anything and no artist, musician, or author has a day job.

Now it's your turn. Eben Moglen tell us to not stop until we're free. Let's paint a picture of what that free world looks like. Most importantly, let's challenge ourselves to find ways to make it possible.

I'm off on a short European tour for the next weeks -- in all likelihood my only trip to Europe this summer. I'll be visiting three conferences where I have planned talks. These include:

• The iCommons iSummit (essentially, the Creative Commons conference). I'll be talking about philosophy of free culture movement and continuing my pitch for a set of goals for free culture and the Definition of Free Cultural Works. I'll be in Dubrovnik Croatia between 14-18 June and will be giving a talk 16 June.
• After missing last year -- my first absence since DebConf 1 -- I'll be at DebConf 7, this years instance of the annual Debian Conference. I'll be giving a an overview of academic work on Debian on 21 June and facilitating a round-table discussion among Debian derivatives on 22 June. I'll be in Edinburgh for the shin-dig between 18-23 June.
• For 26-28 June, I'll be a guest of Eric von Hippel in Copenhagen for a small meeting/workshop of people interested in and working on issues around von Hippel's idea of, user innovation -- an area of research I am seriously considering pursuing full time next year.

Between 23-26 June, I'll be traveling through the UK from Edinburgh. I have tentative stops planned for a variety of places along the way including Manchester, Cambridge, and London. I suppose there will be pub nights or something similar in each place. Get in contact if you want to meet up along the way.

Harvard Free Culture is helping to organize this years' National Free Culture Conference -- the meeting for North American Free Culture student groups. The whole shindig is planned for May 26, 2007 at Harvard University here in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The schedule is solidifying and I will presenting and arguing for adoption or support of the Free Cultural Works Definition within the FC student movement and probably also be talking about community building and advocacy in some free software groups I've worked with.

Housing is available and the event is open to the public. If you’d like to attend, speak, or help out with the conference, please email freeculture@hcs.harvard.edu or check out the Facebook event.

If you're on the fence about attending, you can read this glowing endorsement of the conference by high protectionist James DeLong at IP Central.

There is cool semi-recent news on the Free Cultural Works Definition front. The board of directors of the Wikimedia Foundation passed a resolution stating that all projects (including Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikibooks):

...are expected to host only content which is under a Free Content License, or which is otherwise free as recognized by the Definition of Free Cultural Works.

There is still room for several exceptions but this must be minimal and the use of such works, "with limited exception, should be to illustrate historically significant events, to include identifying protected works such as logos, or to complement (within narrow limits) articles about copyrighted contemporary works."

For WMF and it's member projects, this was a useful step because it documents and strengthens an important position in favor of explicit goals that I feel is important to successful freedom movements. But it's not a major change for them. The resolution merely codifies what has already become accepted practice within Wikimedia projects.

But this is a major change -- and a major victory -- for freedomdefined.org and the definition. Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, are the single most visible and important centers for the production and dissemination of free culture today. They're also the most successful and a model many want to emulate. Explicit buy in from WMF is a major victory indeed.

My Overprice Tags projects from a few days back has been getting a bunch of attention.

Perhaps most interesting, the MIT libraries -- whose journals we defaced augmented in the project -- have been unbelievably positive about the project! They've written up a very positive description of the event on their website and published an interview with me as well!

Biella Coleman recently mentioned counterfeit drugs in a blog post:

A pirated movie carries little consequence, except for that the movie industry may lose some cash flow. A fake Rolex purchased on the bustling streets of NYC saves you a lot of money (and robs you of a warranty). But counterfeit drugs, the consequences and stakes are at a whole other, more serious, order of things.

Biella's intentions in drawing the analogy are harmless -- people really do lose their lives because of fake drugs while rock-off movies and Rolexes are relatively harmless. However, her aside reminds me of the much less harmless, fair, and honest analogies drawn by Pat Choate in Hot Property who used examples like counterfeit drugs and dishonestly labeled aircraft parts to support a high protectionist position on IP.

Because of the arguments made by people like Choate, I believe that there is a subtle danger in the type of analogy that Biella draws that I think we should try to guard against in the future.

The danger lies in the fact that these comparisons tend to conflate at least two very different kinds of illegal activity. Trademark violations are illegal. So it selling drugs without approval from regulatory bodies. So is manslaughter and murder -- both terms used in the Times article Biella links to to describe the actions of drug counterfeiters. Laws in most countries already prohibit all of these things and offer increasingly harsh punishments for each action. In fact, selling unlicensed drugs and killing people is much more illegal than violating trademark and making knockoffs. And it should be.

When someone commit IP violations in the process of committing much worse crimes, we should focus on highlighting, condemning, and punishing the much worse crime, not the IP violation which in comparison is almost inconsequential. The punishment for counterfeiting drugs may only be a slap on the wrist and that's probably an appropriate punishment for the counterfeiting component of the crime. The other worse crimes that the counterfeiter is also committing should be punished much more harshly.

If, as the Dr. Reggi quoted in the Times article complains, "counterfeiting a medicine can be [only] a misdemeanor," we need stronger laws against selling unregulated drugs -- not stronger IP laws. If we confuse and compare bootleg movies and knock-off Rolexes with fake malaria or AIDS drugs, we're likely to come to the opposite conclusion.

Our reactions to such situations should be, "People are killing people with fake drugs! We need stronger laws against killing people in these ways." They should not be "People are killing people with fake drugs! Interesting to note that they are also violating trademark laws like other counterfeiters." The former reaction will frame the discussion in a way that lets us treat the bad components of the crime more harshly and will not help IP high protectionists argue for stronger IP through a disingenuous process of guilt by association.

Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis is currently suing the Indian government over its patent law in an effort to further limit production of generic drugs in India. Among other drugs, the company is trying to stop India's production of generic AIDS medicines that supplies more than half of the developing world. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has a great FAQ and bunch of other information on their access to essential medicines (AEM) site that you should check out if you are unfamiliar with the case.

Mika has been working on a variety of AEM projects for a while with quite a few important successes. From a certain perspective, some of the core calls for access to knowledge share common ground with free software, free culture, and anti software patent advocacy that I've been involved in. Of course, it puts things in perspective to see Mika and others in the AEM community point to millions of people and say that those people will die because of an IP maximilist position.

Last week, I went with Mika to a protest of Novartis near MIT. It was just below freezing, slushy, raining, sleeting, and probably the worst weather I've ever experienced in Cambridge. Despite all that, it was wonderful to join a large group of activists in Cambridge/Boston and around the world to send a strong message to Novartis. You can watch a video of the protest or see a set of photographs. Both were taken by my friend Jay.

The previous year saw far too much fighting over who gets to define and control the term free culture. The biggest problem, in my opinion, is that these fights conflate a very important discussion about the goals of a set of nascent social movements -- or the lack thereof -- with much less important issues of semantics, definitions, and control over terms. The term is being used in a way that describes a whole lot of projects I support and participate in fully -- and a few I don't. And I think that's OK.

When Erik Möller and I launched the Free Cultural Works Definition (at the time, the Free Content and Expression Definition), we struggled to find a good term for the works that we wanted to liberate. We thought about using the terms content, expression, knowledge, information, art, data and communication but each word seemed to exclude an important body of works or producers. Few musicians we knew thought of their productions as "content" while few encyclopedia writers did not.

The term we liked most was culture: it defines a very broad set of practice and has very positive connotations. Of course, others had already been using the term free culture so we spent some reading up on the term and talking to the people most closely associated with it. Originally, the term seems to have its roots in the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. I reread the book to get an idea for exactly what Lessig meant when he used the term but, upon reaching the end, I found myself without a good answer. The book's index included a promising entry for "Free culture, defined" which pointed to a short section in the preface:

A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here.

Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control. (emphasis mine)

Framed by a negative definition of what free culture is not, Lessig's definition describes the broad space between two unattainable extremes. This resulting ambiguity is fully intended: Lessig has not only spoken out against my particular suggestion but against any definition and the process of offering ex cathedra definitions or goals altogether [1].

In personal conversations about our definition, Lessig was initially very supportive. In fact, it was Lessig who introduced Erik and I to each other and suggested that we work together. What Lessig did disagree with us on however, was calling the definition the Free Culture Definition. I think that Lessig felt some sense of ownership of the term and felt that he and others had defined it and been using it in a way that was broader and incompatible with the definition we were proposing and with any definition of the type of we were suggesting.

Early on, Lessig blessed a group of students to create a Free Culture student movement. Most active now in Harvard Free Culture and Free Culture NYU and but in a handful of other places as well, these groups have been involved in everything from the promotion of transgressive approaches to IP, to speech bubbles, to anti-DRM work, to protecting the right of cereal restaurants to operate. When Erik and I suggested to this group that they might benefit from adopting the Free Cultural Works Definition as a set of explicit ideals or goals for their movement, the larger part of the coalition soundly rejected the idea. Like Lessig, they wanted free culture to refer to wide variety of projects and did not feel good about describing any work by sympathetic parties as "non-ideal."

Erik and I were faced with two choices: we could call our definition the Free Culture Definition and in effect engage in a power struggle with Lessig and with some portion of the free culture student movement or we could pick another term. While we don't like the alternatives as much as free culture, we didn't have a lot of trouble deciding that going with a term like free cultural work or free content and expression was the better choice.

This is why I am a little worried about the recently announced UK-based Free Culture Foundation. I have nothing but respect for the founders (Matt Lee, Tom Chance, and Rob Myers) and trust them to create the type of free culture organization that I would like to see. I am very much looking forward to working closely with them on this project in the future. They seem likely to choose a set of goals and adopt a set of strategies in line with the ones I've argued for. But in that my goals and strategies have run into opposition among many of the most visible people using the term free culture in the past, that's also why I'm a little worried.

SJ Klein and I were recently saying that its time to start naming organizations and projects in this area using only words in dead languages. That way, we can side-step the (unimportant) semantic arguments over who gets to control existing terms and focus on the real goal of building stronger social movements, setting goals that sound as unthreatening to each other as they actually are, and building better tools. Without semantic arguments in our way, we'll be able stronger to build coalitions and work together in all the ways we should be.

Is Mika's new shirt meaningless engrish drivel or a statement against the violence of DRM? Or both?

My friend James Grimmelmann, currently a Resident Fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and an Adjunct Professor at New York Law School, contacted me recently because he was concerned that it doesn't seem likely that parallel distribution language is going to make it in latest draft of the Creative Commons 3.0 licenses. The issues and arguments around parallel distribution are complex but James and I both think that the status quo represents a mistake and a lost opportunity by CC. As a result, we have written a position statement that tries to explain the issues simply, make a case for parallel distribution, and answer some of the criticism that has been leveled against the idea.

Prompted by conversations with hackers from Debian (myself included), CC lawyers recommend new "parallel distribution" language at the beginning of the CC 3.0 license revision process as a way to fix unanticipated effects of the current CC anti-DRM clause. Immediate negative reactions by a number of people demoted the language to an issue for debate. While the resulting debate has been both lengthy and heated, it has not involved more than a small handful of voices or led to any firm decisions. Time is running out for the drafts of CC's 3.0 licenses and unless something changes, the status quo -- no parallel distribution -- will remain. As a result, it's extremely important that users of CC licenses try to familiarize themselves with the issue and to make their voice heard.

James and I feel the lack of a parallel distribution language in the CC licenses represents a failure by CC to live up to its own ideals and to do what is in the best interest of the users of CC licenses. Please read our position statement, pass the link and article around to others, and make yourself heard either on the cc-licenses list by emailing cc-licenses@lists.ibiblio.org or by posting a response on the comments page in my wiki.

Finally, as a Debian developer, it's important for me to say that I do not think that the lack of parallel distribution makes the CC licenses non-free under the DFSG -- especially in light of the recent general resolution on the GFDL which deemed the GFDL, which contains language that is extremely similar to the current CC text, DFSG free. CC should use parallel distribution language because it is the right thing to do for the free culture movement and for the users of CC works and not because it will have any effect on the inclusion of CC BY and BY-SA works in Debian.

You can find the position statement at: http://wiki.mako.cc/ParallelDistribution

I went to a talk today by Sun scientist Susan Landau on Sun's DReaM/Open Media Commons DRM system that I've mentioned in the past. Landau used a variant of these slides to do a rough overview of the Sun system and the problems that it is trying to solve.

Halfway through her talk, Landau showed a slide titled, "Users Matter: Creative Commons." Elaborating, Landau mentioned that she had been talking to a number of people -- both at CC and outside -- about the possibility of using DReaM to enforce the terms of CC licenses.

I interrupted Landau to point out that CC licenses had an anti-DRM clause that, as far I knew, would make her system unusable on CC content. The CC anti-DRM clause, plus the resistance of the CC and iCommons community to accept parallel distribution language, are why it's impossible to play CC-licensed works on an unmodified PlayStation or XBox (these systems only play signed disks) -- even if you include an unencumbered copy alongside! Landau reassured me that I must be mistaken and that she had talked about DReaM in depth with CC leadership, lawyers, and technical advisory board members and she was sure her system was at least possible. Puzzled, I shut up.

For most of the rest of her talk, Landau talked about fair use and how a DRM system might go about respecting it. In his qualified endorsement of the DRM system, Lessig mentioned that DReaM, "would be implemented to allow individuals to assert 'fair use,' and unlock DRM'd content, with a tag to trace misuse." At the time, I had a hard time imagining how fair use could be built into such a system -- separating fair from unfair use is remarkably resistant to technical solutions. Even bright light cases like verbatim copies every page of the Encyclopedia Britannica might be fair use if I were to make them into a paper mâché bust of Johann Gutenburg or use them to wallpaper a gallery wall.

Landau's acknowledged the trickiness around fair use and suggested a compromise:

By default, works might be encumbered in the ways and to the degrees that the copyright holder wish. However, users could petition for an unencumbered "fair use copy" by identifying themselves and then checking some boxes and explaining (briefly) why they think their use for the work qualifies as fair. Once they've done this, the system would present the user with an unencumbered, watermarked, and fully traceable piece of media.

Conceivably, requests would be subject to some sort of review (at the very least to prevent automated requests) and non-fair uses of watermarked goods would be strictly tracked. If a "fair use" copy is found in the wild, the watermark would be traced and the originator would be held liable. Of course, anonymous fair use becomes impossible but, as Simson Garfinkel pointed out at Landau's talk, users may have a right to anonymous speech and to fair use but not to anonymous fair use. "Fair" enough.

It is perhaps important to point out that DReaM does not currently implement this "fair use" system and that, one can only assume, the vast majority of DReaM users (e.g., Hollywood movie studios and their ilk) would have no little interest in giving their users a blanket ability to make "fair use copies" and would in most cases choose not to enable such an option.

But let's return to the issue of DRM enforcement of CC license terms. While I was initially quite confused by the idea of DRM enforcement of CC license terms, it made much more sense when I looked at the CC anti-DRM clause itself:

You may not distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work with any technological measures that control access or use of the Work in a manner inconsistent with the terms of this License Agreement.

The emphasis (mine) points to the crux of the issue. The CC anti-DRM clause only blocks technological measures that overstep the boundaries set in the rest of the licensee. For the free licenses, that's a wide boundary that leaves little room for DRM. But as I've pointed out before, CC is a lot more than just free licenses.

Landau mentioned that her group was primarily interested in using the DReaM system to enforce attribution and non-derivative work clauses in CC licenses -- a wise choice as non-commercial use is hard enough for humans to discern. As a result, the DReaM system might be used to make it impossible to remove attribution from CC works or might block modification to works marked as "ND." The catch that led me to believe that CC license blocked all DRM was the fact that I didn't think it would be possible for a DRM system to respect fair use. After all, each CC license includes an explicit affirmation that, "nothing in this license is intended to reduce, limit, or restrict any rights arising from fair use."

The question that the possibility of a CC DRM scheme like DReaM hangs on is: to what degree does Landau's suggestion live up to the fair use legal bargain?

Landau pointed out that a number of lawyers including Pam Samuelson and CC's technical advisory board and legal staff have been generally positive about her fair use permission-asking compromise. Honestly and on CC's own terms, it's hard to see why they wouldn't be. The loss of anonymous fair use was only ever a right we enjoyed by a fortunate accident. Watermarks are only there to "keep honest people honest." If you are not doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?

But DReaM enforcement of CC licenses is a bad thing and the bad taste that it inevitably leaves in many commoners mouths is not hard to explain:

• Many commoners are not comfortable with the idea of DRM because it shifts power over users' computing devices away from the users and makes computers obey the will of a copyright holder. That's true of DReaM just as much as as it is of Apple iTunes or Microsoft DRM.
• Many commoners are not completely comfortable with all CC licenses, so the idea of technical protection measures enforcing these terms, even those allowing for fair use lines and in line with the will of the author, is seen as dangerous.

To solve the first issue, CC needs a more strongly worded anti-DRM clause -- ideally one tied to a parallel distribution clause. To solve the second, we will ultimately need a new banner under which only truly free cultural works will reside.

Susan Landau doesn't have it easy but she does seem to have the genuine best interest of consumers and users at heart. That's more than I can say about the vast majority of people in the DRM business. She's trying to walk a fine line and she's almost certainly being abused and heckled by folks in the industry who call her "communist" and by folks like me who feel that she's sacrificing essential principles in an attempt to compromise. The one thing we all agree on is that the ground she's treading is mine field.

Yet while I sympathize with her, I must speak out against both her and DReaM. A DRM compromise at this stage would be insanity. This is a fight we have to win.

There are many things at MIT that I find I want to distance myself from (e.g., much of the military related research). Recently though, the MIT Libraries have been giving me a number of reasons to be proud to be an MIT graduate student.

MIT has taken the brave step of the being one of the first major research universities to throw a stone at the publishers in the whole Open Access, scholarly publishing debate. The libraries have put up a bunch of information on open access issues and have created a copyright amendment form for all scholarly publication that will allow the institute and its authors to retain copyright over their work for publication in the institute archives, on the author's website, or even in an open access repository like PubMed Central. More importantly, MIT Libraries are offering to do all of the negotiation with the publishers on behalf of the authors. When it is MIT as a whole, and not just the one graduate student, post-doc, or professor on their own, it puts the authors in a much stronger to retain the openness of their work. It's not victory, but it's an important and essential step toward open access for scholarly publishing.

But that's not it! The libraries have also recently stood up to Hoover's Online's attempt to hold the libraries responsible for, "activity Hoovers deemed — or even suspected — was fraudulent." When Hoover's gave the libraries the choice of saying yes to a set of unreasonable terms or walking away from an important research tool, MIT Libraries made the difficult but correct choice and walked away. Making a choice like that will surely get the libraries a lot of flak from MIT scholars who use Hoover's. But MIT made the right decision by standing up for their principles.

The effect of large, powerful institution like MIT is usually to maintain the status quo. There's clearly a lot of external pressure from funders, politicians, etc. and internal pressure from academics and students who are doing well by the current system. MIT Libraries are using their power to make the whole system better and I haven't ever been as proud to be an MIT student.

I had the idea for an iPod liberation event several months ago. The idea is something similar to a GNU/Linux install-fest but for Digital Audio Players with RockBox and iPodLinux. Installers gain the ability to play Vorbis and FLAC (among many other things) and lose the ability to do DRM. I would never recommend buying an iPod but we need to face the fact that there are millions of these things now. A good reinstall with a free and open platform seems like a good start.

With the help of Harvard Free Culture, Defective By Design, and Computing Counter-Culture (my recently renamed research group at the MIT Media Lab), I've finally got around to organizing an event.

If you're in the Cambridge/Boston area this Friday evening (October 6) and want to liberate your iPod, you should read the details and show up. If you've already liberated your iPod and would like to help others with theirs, you should bring a laptop and get there a bit early.

More information is available on the Harvard Free Culture website.

Unfortunately, I couldn't make it to the Creative Commons Concert in New York City last weekend. All proceeds for the concert went to Creative Commons.

Now I may be wrong about this and will happily stand corrected if I am, but, as far as I can tell, none of the artists performing at the benefit have ever released an album or a major piece of work under a Creative Commons license -- even the restrictive and non-free licenses.

The free culture movement needs some things more than money. For example, it needs high quality creative works under permissive licenses. We'd be better off with the good press associated with one hit single under a CC BY-SA license than all of the proceeds of a benefit like Friday's. It might also be nice to highlight the great work being done by artists who are risking more secure economic models in favor of releasing their works under free licenses.

Or perhaps this reminds us of another important conversation: Why are many popular musicians who are willing to support CC unwilling or unable to use the licenses? More importantly, how are we going to change this?

Recently, I had an opportunity to publicly discuss my projects around definitions of freedom for creative work with Lawrence Lessig at a workshop at Wizards of OS. In particular, we talked about my article Toward a Standard of Freedom in which I advance a call for a list of essential freedoms, a definition of free culture or content, and a goal around which a social movement for free creative works can be based.

At WOS, Lessig and I agreed that its likely that, eventually, some standard (or standards) of freedom will take hold. Like me, Lessig seems to think that this is a good thing. We both agree that there will be, and should be, competing definitions of freedom, competing social movements, and a long conversation about what essential freedom really to creative works is before we get there.

Our most fundamental differences seem to stem from a disagreement about who gets to define freedom or, perhaps more precisely, who the communities of producers should listen to in order to find out what essential freedoms in the domain of different types of creative works are.

Lessig is extremely reticent to make any claims about what essential freedoms might be: he does not want to speak for creative communities that he does not intimately understand. While he seems to be suspect of any project making normative claims in this regard, he disagrees most strongly with projects like mine that offer definitions of free content and expressions that are intended to be applied broadly and outside of the explicit domain of the definition's initiators recognized experience (in our case, online encyclopedias and software).

Lessig explained that he trusts musicians -- and in particular, Gilberto Gil, the progenitor of the CC Sampling license -- when it comes to defining essential freedoms for music. Similarly, he trusts programmers -- and in particular, Richard Stallman -- when it comes to defining essential freedom for software. Since Richard and I are less accomplished, less well known, and less experienced musicians, Lessig feels most comfortable erring in favor of Gil where there's a disagreement between us about the scope of essential freedom for music. While his is a convincing argument, I disagree with Lessig's position for a series of reasons I'll try to discuss here.

First, it is important to remember that Gilberto Gil does not represent all musicians. There are many artists and musicians who support my definition. There are many (and probably more if the CC license usage statistics are any indication) who support Gil's lower base-line. It's worth remembering that, even though we disagree, both Gil and I are offering controversial and extreme positions. Today, most creators think that giving away their work at no cost, even non-commercially and barring derivatives, is crazy.

To illustrate why this is not a problem, we can look again to free software. In the free software community, we see that Richard Stallman does not speak for the programming community at large when it comes to defining essential freedoms to code. In the mid-eighties, Stallman spoke for himself and a tiny handful of like-minded others. Today he speaks for many more but it's still a tiny fraction of all programmers. It's hard to remember when you're down in the trenches but the idea that software should be free remains a marginal and kooky idea to this day. Due to the hard work of the free software movement, many people have adopted Stallman's definition of essential freedom for software and many more will. But it is not mainstream and it didn't get here by being so.

Setting an ethical standard and a goal for a social movement should not be about being popular. It should be about describing an ideal. It should be about standing up to injustice. It should be about answering the question, "what sort of world do I want to live in?" Not only is this process not a popularity contest, it will, in all likelihood, stand to make one very unpopular.

Being respected or seen as an expert within a field will help with the adoption of one's ideal. Programmers trusted Richards Stallman because he'd written large parts of the very popular programming tools like GNU Emacs and GCC. However, it wasn't from his experience in programming that this insight into the importance of software freedom stemmed. It was from his desire to be a good, ethical, neighbor and member of a technical community. To this day, most great programmers continue to disagree with Richard.

Second, I'm interested not only in talking about the ability of authors to choose how their works are used but in the rights of readers. You don't need to have a platinum album under your belt to have an informed and important opinion about how music should be heard, experienced and distributed. Lessig's current push for a "Read-Write Culture" is very fixated on creators and re-mixers. That's only one important piece of the community that frames and deals with this problem.

Third, while I agree with Lessig that discussions around definitions of free culture must happen separately in each separate artist community, I see several compelling reasons why a single definition of freedom may be a very good idea both tactically and philosophically. For example, it provides a common rallying cry around which different creative groups can collaborate and it mirrors the common treatment of different types of works in current IP systems. More importantly, there are fundamental similarities between information goods and the way they are created, distributed, and consumed on computers and in digital networks. I've highlighted this before in quoting Eben Moglen on the ethics of creating artificial scarcity in goods with zero marginal cost.

As a final note, it's worth stating that one doesn't need to feel that all works should be free to support a definition of freedom. Richard Stallman provides a great example of this. Stallman doesn't think that works of opinion or works that are designed primarily to entertain need to be free. However, he does believe that the term "free" should refer to a fixed set of freedoms so that he can take such a position. Without a definition of "free," a position on what should or should not be "free" is impossible.

I believe that freedom to distribute and produce information goods like art and content and software are embedded in a set of freedoms and rights for both the producers and consumers. I think that to some degree (and quite probably a less extensive degree), Lessig agrees with this. Unlike Lessig, I don't believe that one needs extensive expertise in the creation of a particular type of creative good to make true statements about what is ethical or unethical in the production, distribution, and control of it. To use admittedly extreme analogies, you don't need to be a slave owner (or slave for that matter) to say that slavery is wrong. You don't need to be a farmer to make arguments against or in favor of vegetarianism or in favor of free range animals. I don't believe you have to be a technologist to claim that certain freedoms to technology are essential. I don't believe that you need to be an musician (successful or not) to make claims about essential rights to music.

I welcomed the conversations and challenges that Lessig offered and it was encouraging to see agreement on the process of discussion and debate going forward. After the workshop, Lessig suggested that we continue the conversation. I look forward to doing just this in other venues and in other ways.

My joint workshop with Lawrence Lessig at Wizards of OS went, in my opinion, extremely well. The worst hitch was an unfortunate series of events that conspired to keep Vera Franz from attending and moderating the session as planned. Paul Keller, who was supposed to participate in the panel, graciously (and capably) moderated in her place.

The panel allowed Lessig and I to talk openly and publicly about about our disagreements for the first time while also highlighting the many places where we speak with one voice. The conversation managed to be both positive and productive without papering over issues.

I usually like to post talk notes and slides after each speaking engagement. However, our WOS meeting was a "workshop" so I have nothing prepared to present here. I have, however, seen two write-ups in the press:

• This article in IP Watch
• This piece in Heise (German)

If someone has a recording, tell me how I might get a copy.

One small note: I am quoted in IP watch as saying that most CC works are under the most restrictive licenses and that there has been no shift toward less restrictive licenses with time. Mia Garlick has pointed out that the latest license usage statistics, based on admittedly imprecise linkback data, show a several percentage point decrease in the usage of licenses that block commercial use and derivatives -- when expressed as a fraction of the total number of works under CC licenses. The restrictive licenses are still the most popular but it was incorrect to say that there is no evidence of any progress whatsoever toward more free licenses.

Tomorrow, I will post a summary and response to one of the points that Lessig and I talked most about.

I'm in Berlin for just over 48 hours to give a workshop at Wizards of OS 4.

The workshop is Free Content Licensing: Success, Challenges and the Way Forward and will be a conversation between myself, Lawrence Lessig, and Paul Keller from Waag Society and Creative Commons Netherlands.

When I first published Toward a Standard of Freedom (my first article that was critical of Creative Commons) a couple years ago, I received an email from someone at Creative Commons within two hours of posting the note. The email pointed out that I had incorrectly licensed my work as the CC license I applied to my essay had the old mailing address for CC. I thanked the mail's author for pointing out my mistake but asked if, perhaps, she or someone else at CC had anything to say about the content of the article itself which was, after all, about her organization's work. I never received a reply.

To date, I have not been able to engage in meaningful public discussion of my criticism of CC with CC, although I have tried several times.

I'm thrilled that Volker Grassmuck and the Wizards of OS organizers have been able to put together this opportunity to start what I hope will be a longer conversation with people at CC about some of what some of us perceive as tactical shortcomings of the CC approach. It can only make our movements stronger.

In the last couple years, I've earned something of a reputation for giving Creative Commons a hard time. This fact hit home a few weeks ago when a reporter for the San Antonio Current called me up to get "the other side" on a story he was doing on CC. Apparently, the journalist had found my name in the criticism section of Wikipedia's Creative Commons article.

Now, while I'm not happy with CC's reticence to take a normative stance of any kind and I'm not thrilled with many CC licenses that don't respect what I believe are essential freedoms, I should give credit to CC where credit is due.

Over the past half year or so, I've had the pleasure of helping represent Debian in conversations between a Debian team and folks at CC to help iron out a number of nits with the CC licenses that seemed to be (unnecessarily) creating barriers to Debian blessing some more permissive licenses as DFSG free. Throughout this process, folks at CC have been helpful, responsive, flexible, and seriously willing to make changes based on our suggestions.

The first and hardest stage of this work culminated with CC's release of the discussion draft of their 3.0 licenses. Evan Prodromou published a great in-depth report on the talks between Debian and CC that helped shape these drafts. While we didn't get 100% of what we were asking, I'm personally quite confident that we have or will get all of what is necessary to ensure that the licenses are DFSG free both in letter and spirit.

Not only does CC build several great licenses, they are willing to work with the community in difficult meaningful ways. When we build a real social movement around calls for essential freedom of culture and content, we'll be lucky to have CC writing some of the licenses that help make it happen.

I've been doing a little research on the open access to scientific articles movement to bring myself up to speed. It's interesting because while they have adopted CC licensing and are often mentioned in the same breath as open source and free software, they have employed a set of normative stances and tactics that seems to be very different than what you'd see in those communities. Lots of good stuff.

Nature has a nice focus page on the debate around open access in the scientific community. In it, they link to articles that they have published on the topic including one titled, Societies take united stand on journal access. Of course, if you try to click on the article and are not on an IP block of a subscriber, you are brought to a page that requires that pay US $30 for the article.

I'll bet I can name at least one society that's not part of that united stand.

I gave a talk last week at a gathering at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS). The gathering was called Come Together and the theme was technology, social movements, and social change. The line-up included 8 people in addition to myself and ended with a talk by Noam Chomsky.

The talk focused on introducing folks to the idea of social movements around information freedom by introducing a big picture view of problems introduced by contemporary IP and a quick breakdown of some of the types of ways that people are attempting to resist, provide alternatives to, or change the system for the better. I did not use slides but I have (very rough) notes available for those that are interested.

Information Freedom talk notes:

• HTML
• ReStructured Text

While adding the notes to my website, I noticed that I never uploaded the slides or notes from the longer (better) version of a talk on a similar topic that I gave at the Darklight Film Festival's annual symposium last year. The talk was titled, Software, Freedom, and the World Beyond Computer Programs.

Aimed a non-technical audience, the talk began by introducing intellectual property and tries to describe the history of the current problems created by modern IP policy. Like the Come Together talk, it continued by offering the same rough classification of the types of "solutions" being offered. Unlike the Come Together talk, I then went into much more depth on the reasons Free Software has succeeded in the information technology realm and tried to describe some of the benefits and limitations of applying the "open source" model to the production of other types of creative works. I gave the talk on October 28, 2005 in Dublin, Ireland. Slides and talk notes are available.

Software, Freedom, and the World Beyond Computer Programs slides:

• PDF
• Open Document Presentation (i.e., OpenOffice.org 2.0)

Software, Freedom, and the World Beyond Computer Programs talk notes:

• HTML
• ReStructured Text

There's a disturbing little press release floating around where the Sun-backed Open Media Commons announces it's release of a new DRM specification to be implemented using free software. That people are creating DRM systems under open source and free software licenses is not surprising; much of the encryption technology on which DRM is based has been free and open for a long time. What is disturbing is that it contains what appears to be an endorsement by Lawrence Lessig:

Lawrence Lessig, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Creative Commons and Professor of Law at Stanford Law School: "In a world where DRM has become ubiquitous, we need to ensure that the ecology for creativity is bolstered, not stifled, by technology. We applaud Sun's efforts to rally the community around the development of open-source, royalty-free DRM standards that support "fair use" and that don't block the development of Creative Commons ideals."

Lessig's position seems to be that DRM is bad and should not exist. But in a world where it does exist, he thinks that not-quite-so-bad DRM is better than the alternatives. Is that the sort of message we want to be sending?

The fact that the software is "open source" is hardly good enough if the purpose of the software is to take away users freedom -- in precisely the way that DRM does.

It doesn't help that EFF has already spoken out against this project.

Lessig is on the board of directors of both EFF and FSF. I think it is smart for members of either organization who are opposed to DRM, even when it's sweetened up, to contact those organizations and let them know how you feel.

On the OMC website, there is a photo of two young attractive people listening to a single pair of headphones. Apparently, the people in the picture need to share a single pair of headphones because the Open Media Commons rights management system won't allow them to share the digital media itself.

Seth Schoen pointed me to this article by Ray Nimmer (not to be confused with the (more) famous copyright scholar David Nimmer). Nimmer₂ is an outspoken advocate of strong copyright and is very skeptical of free software.

What is interesting about this article is the overlap between my argument in Toward a Standard of Freedom and the argument made by Nimmer₂. Nimmer₂'s subject is the free information movement and he argues against a principled position and a social movement toward freedom. He argues that part of Free Software's maturation can be seen in what he sees as the movement's tendency to look beyond its principles and standards. He positively describes a trend of putting aside core values and principles -- both in terms of the particular values in the FSD, OSD and DFSG and in terms of the method of building a movement around a defined standard of freedom -- as, "an assertion of productive and healthy individualism [that] arguably, reflects an expansion of the core ideas of open source outside the narrow confines of its own limiting doctrines."

He holds up Creative Commons as a productive example of how the free information and culture movement is getting beyond their whole doctrine, principles and standards nonsense. If we look at CC as part of a larger free information movement that may eventually start influencing free software, he may be right.

Open Source succeeded in separating the doctrine and definitions of Free Software from its principles and ethical arguments. Creative Commons, and others following their example, has now introduced a broader free information movement that has fully excised any fixed definitions of freedom and openness and has even abandoned the strategy of providing definitions at all.

This of course, is precisely the argument I made in Toward a Standard of Freedom but it's a little disconcerting to see it made by someone on the other side who then comes to the opposite conclusions. As Seth put it, "Nimmer is saying that CC is doing exactly what you're saying it's doing, except that he thinks it's good because he doesn't like free software!"

Antiquated technology makes for emancipatory possibilities.

—Alan Toner (2005)

Perhaps a truism. Perhaps merely what I fear is a prescient statement.

About a year and a half ago, I wrote an essay on Creative Commons that was critical of what I thought was a major difference between CC and the Free Software movement that many folks in the Free Software world didn't seem to see. I showed it to a number of people and received a series of very mixed reactions. Some folks from iCommons Italy said they were reconsidering their role in CC. Cory Doctorow (who worked for CC at the time) compared me to a Troskyite. Others were conflicted.

Since I knew the article was potentially inflammatory and could easily be misunderstood, I've sat on it. In the last year, the things that bothered me about CC have continued or been aggravated and my article has continued to be passed around and revised. A growing number of people have been pushing me to publish. Under pressure -- and kind words -- from both Richard Stallman and a team of folks at Libroscope in France, (in addition to everyone who has been pushing me all along), I've finally decided to throw the article out there.

Many people seem to be criticizing CC lately and I don't agree with all of them. As I say in the article, I think CC is doing a lot of good. My criticism is not with what CC has done but with the fact that they have failed to take a strong ethical position in the way that that has made Free Software successful.

Please feel free to pass the text around. The piece is short and I encourage anyone to read it and send me feedback. If you're at What The Hack, just find me.

Finally, thank you to everyone who helped listen to this, read it, give me feedback, send me corrections. An incomplete list includes Alan Toner, Jamie King, Julien Tayon, Antoine Pitrou, Biella Coleman, Andreea Carnu, Richard Stallman, Holger Levsen, and WTH-DebCamp the Debconf5 sauna party.

You can read the whole article at its canonical(!) location on my homepage or upon on on Advogato. Source is also available.

Through the generosity of one of my favorite people, a Thinkpad X21 has recently entered my life. The X21, like many other IBM laptops, has small LED right above the LCD inside the lid's bevel. The LED can be toggled on and off with a key combination on the keyboard and is designed to illuminate the keyboard and mouse. However, it is not particularly bright and does absolutely nothing except in complete darkness. At that point, it's light is basically drowned out by the light coming from the LCD. It's a cute gimmick but it is not particularly useful.

At Greg Pomerantz's 43811/1461 birthday party, I wondered out loud who thought this would be a useful feature. Greg pointed out that anybody who held a patent on the technology might think so. After all, they went through the trouble of getting the patent; they might as well use it for something!

Sure enough, IBM holds US Patent number 6,561,668 for a computer with keyboard illuminator for use in operating environments with inadequate ambient lighting conditions. Here's the abstract:

In a portable computer, an LED holder is provided in the upper portion of an LCD and an LED is attached inside the LED holder. Light emitted from the LED passes through an aperture provided in the bottom portion of the LED holder and illuminates a keyboard. Furthermore, switching on or off the LED is manually performed by a switch installed in the portable computer and is also controlled from a utility program, etc., by a switching controller circuit installed inside a main body.

Thank $GOD for patent law. Without it, the inventor of the LED on the laptop screen would not have been motivated to follow through on this highly original and non-obvious innovation. The fact that other computer manufacturers will not be able to mount dim LEDs above their laptop monitors without shelling out to IBM is the small price society pays to encourage such breakthroughs and to make sure that all of the information necessary to reproduce this invention is fully available to us in the form of published patent.

So on the IP::JUR -- an important WIPO and international IP high-protectionist weblog -- there's quite a bit of concern about this recent campaign booklet by ATTAC.

Unfortunately, I can't read German anywhere near well enough to make my way through the booklet so I can only read what Horn, the blog's author, has to say about it.

If you read the post, you'll see that there is real fear from the high protectionist crowd that this is a step towards unification of what has been a rather broad and separate set of anti-patent movements -- and in a way that is even more frightening to the high protectionists, a wide range of groups critiquing different types of IP.

Whether or not real steps along these lines have actually been made, I think it paints a picture of a solid strategy we should pursue -- and not just because it strikes fear into the heart of "our political adversaries." In dealing with patents, the anti-software patents folks have a lot to gain from joining hands with the access to essential medicine folks and we've both got something to gain from working with groups challenging patents -- and other types of IP -- in a host of other fields.

Part of the reason that IP is so strong right now and so highly connected to international trade's legal and policy apparatuses is that folks from a wide range of vastly different industries working with what is vastly different types of law (trademark, patents, copyrights and trade secrets are very different) were able to promote a single concept -- a banner -- of "intellectual property" under which they could rally and join forces. Our potential for success in deconstructing these system may lie in part in our ability to use tools and terms in the same ways to create an anti-IP or IP-reform movement that is more powerful than any single group's interest and that ultimately will be more effective than what any group could achieve on its own.

I think it's interesting to see real recognition from the other side of our success so far and our potential for continued success that places us in a place of an adversary that is no longer ignorable. I think this one is ours to lose.

The article ends with:

Another interesting question in response to this booklet is the connectivity between copyright affairs, on the one hand, and patent affairs, on the other hand. Can the IP system be defended only in its entirety or will there be a considerable shear stress from groups defending the copyright system but not the patent system, and, not to forget, vice versa?

Patents and copyrights can no longer to discussed, attacked, or defended separately and the IP industry only has themselves to blame. TRIPS was one step toward collapsing the two concepts into a single conversation but the work of software companies in recent years has cemented any ambiguity.

This question will be answered in the realm of free software which, whether we like it or not, sits at the intersection of, and is highly influenced by, both patent and copyright policies. The free software crowd is going to fight both because we have to for our survival. I think that if we learn to work with others in other camps and in both areas, the effect will go well beyond the world of software. Which is exactly what they fear.

Seth Schoen gave me a whole much of cool stickers that were evidently made by Don Marti several years ago. The stickers say "OPEN" and are a parody of the DMAT logo. Here are pictures of the DMAT logo and the OPEN stickers:

For those that don't know, DMAT was the trade-name for the recording industry's Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI). It was basically a secure (read DRM) standard that the recording industry wanted to use to kill MP3. Except it wasn't a standard. It was many incompatible standards. That may not even have been the biggest thing wrong with SDMI.

There was a time, not really very long ago, when people I knew were very afraid of SDMI and what it would might do to online music. As you might imagine, DMAT/SDMI fell on its face.

In any case, the sticker is a funny parody. I put them all over the place. Of course, because SDMI was so completely unsuccessful, very few people get the joke. This is my favorite thing about the stickers.

The door to my apartment has an OPEN sticker on it. This is funny because the term "open," as it is commonly used, is rarely an accurate way to describe the state of the door. In the sense of the sticker (meaning DRM free), it is technically true -- but only because the lock is not digital. Our door is certainly a piece of technology that we use to protect our more traditional property rights.

While I'm on the subject (and since I will almost definitely never return), I should point out that one of the only places I could find any copy of the DMAT logo is in the portfolio of work for the corporate name generation firm "Catchword" whose motto seems to be: "a great name is the genesis of a lasting brand." Evidently, the recording industry paid some expensive naming firm to come up with the idea to replace the very unsexy "SMDI" with the oh-so-hot "DMAT" with the the promise this would lead to a lasting brand. If I were Catchword, I'm not sure I'd host the only google-accessable copy of the logo in the portfolio I show to my clients.

Greg Pomerantz pointed me to this article on a recent 2nd Circuit copyright decision. The case basically disambiguated the term "owner" in 17 U.S.C. §117 (a). It may seem nit-picky and obscure but (AFAICT, IANAL, OMG) this decision has good implications for free software hackers. Because Greg continues to refuse a blog of his own, I've agreed to write this up to spread the good news.

As the article points out, §117 (a) of the copyright code provides an affirmative defense against copyright infringement for anyone who owns a physical copy of a computer program and who makes an adaptation "as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine," and uses it "in no other manner." Basically, owners of programs can modify said programs.

The case in question is Krause v. Titleserv Inc., 03-9303. Here is the back story: William Krause was a programmer and consultant hired by Titleserv to write a series of programs over the course of a decade. When Krause left Titleserv, he left the company the right use the software but not modify it. Using technical means that are not entirely clear from what I've read, he left the software "locked" so that the company did not have access to source code or the ability to modify the program. Evidently, the technical means were not very good ones. Titleserv managed to sidestep these restrictions and bring the software back into modifiable source form. They modified the program to keep it working a number of times and in a number of sometimes rather intrusive ways.

As I mentioned above, copyright law says that the right to modify is something all owners have. As a result, the core argument in the case boiled down to Krause saying that the owner of the software was the person who held a title to the software -- unsurprising himself in this case. Titleserv, predictably enough, argued that the owner was anybody who rightfully possessed the software and that any rightful possessor of a copy was an "owner" and could modify software without any risk of infringement.

Second Circuit Judges Pierre Leval and Robert Katzmann sided with Titleserv. Leval said that courts should, "inquire into whether the party exercises sufficient incidents of ownership over a copy of the program to be sensibly considered the owner of the copy for purposes of §117(a)." Rightful possession is ownership.

Krause also argued for a narrow definition of "essential" that would only cover modifications necessary to keep the program functioning. The court was willing to side with Titleserv again and adopt a broad interpretation of "essential" that covered the wide range of changes that Titleserv made: everything from bug fixes to updates to cosmetic changes.

For free and open source software hackers, this is great news: a broad definition of owner in terms of software is fantastic for software freedom. The implications of ownership as defined as rightful possession are not necessarily limited to a distributed right to modifiability by groups other than the title holder although alone this is a major victory. Apparently, Titleserv sidestepped what sounded like sort of copyright protection device. The ability as the owner to do this on software one rightfully posesses is great. It remains to be seen (or explained) how much or how little good can be squeezed out of this.

The Debian-Legal mailing list talks about the "tentacles of evil test" which is a hypothetical situation that the list uses to evaluate licenses. Basically, the test tries to prevent against bad things happening to rightful possessors if the owner or the ownership for the title of a piece of software falls within the grasp of some nasty anti-freedom entity. I agree that the sentiment is an important freedom concern (although am not always happy with the way it has been employed and applied in the past on the list). This case seems to mean that we can worry a bit less about those tentacles in many situations.

While I'm not happy with the idea of software having owners, this case defines owner in a massively less centralized fashion that many of us had assumed was the case and this is a victory for software freedom.

If you're really interested, here is another article and you can find the full case on Lexis and elsewhere.

As has become customary now, I took a short trip on the subway to check in on the Fordham Annual Conference on International Intellectual Property Law and Policy this year.

The conference always posts an extensive line-up of the biggest and brightest stars in IP law. There are folks from the copyright office, governments around the world, and all of the big media companies. While the conferences usually offers a token spot or two to more critical IP folks like Jamie Love or Fred von Lohnmann, it is basically a high-protectionist love-fest and strategizing session. It's interesting to go to take the pulse of the high protectionist world and to get a preview of upcoming policy and legal pushes around IP enforcement, DRM, litigation, legislation, and more.

It's also always interesting to see the way that free and open source software is treated in the conference. It is particularly interesting in light of that famous quote attributed to Gandhi that Eben Moglen has used in reference to the free software movement: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win.

When I went to Fordham several years ago, free software was completely ignored. In previous years, it has been raised briefly but only to be dismissed and laughed off. They're still telling jokes but the jokes are becoming increasingly vicious (although not increasingly grounded in fact).

As an example of our progress and of the way that free software is treated by some of the most famous and influential minds in IP, here is a very short recording of Hugh C. Hansen -- professor of IP at Fordham, director of the conference and an famous and highly respected name in IP -- speaking about free and open source software and its developers:

• Clip in OGG Vorbis
• Clip in MP3

On the other hand, the conference web site appears to be served by Apache running on Fedora so apparently he has a little good sense.

I have a unofficial policy of not writing "this what I did today" blog entries. Today has been special so I'm going break my rule.

Yesterday night, I met up with Matt Norwood of Columbia Law School and soon-to-be of the Software Freedom Law Center to take a bus down to Washington DC to sleep on the sidewalk in front of the United States Supreme Court with the ultimate goal of seeing the oral arguments to Grokster v. MGM -- an extremely important P2P case and probably the most important copyright and technology case since the Sony Betamax.

Seeing the case argued was an important goal but so was showing support for the EFF and for meeting a hole host of old friends (Seth Schoen, Wendy Seltzer, Annalee Newitz, Cindy Cohn) and for a meeting a few people on my "really should meet" list including Kragen Sitaker.

I met all of the people I'd hoped to met and many new smart and passionate freedom lovers, slept at the court and, through a rather sneaky set of events that I'll detail tomorrow, managed to get into the court to hear the arguments. I was behind a column and at the very back of the room but I was one of the 35 people from the general public that got in so I can't complain.

In my shamelessly biased opinion, I think the case was argued very well by our side and somewhat less well by the entertainment industry lawyers.

The industry lawyers were passionate but the passion behind the responses seemed to overshadow the substance of their argument. The justices asked the industry counsel repeatedly for a description of the legal standard that the industry would replace the simplified version of Betamax that Grokster is clinging to. The industry counsel repeatedly failed to answer these questions in a way that the Justices thought was satisfactory.

Justices that I suspected would be hostile toward Grokster's position, including Justices Ginsberg and Scalia, returned repeatedly to the idea of the lone inventor in her garage unaware of exactly how she might predict the impact or use of her technology without being sued out of business from all sides before she had a chance to let the technology prove itself. They seemed concerned about the industry blocking the next Xerox machine, iPod, or printing press. Souter, Breyer, and Stevens each grilled the industry lawyers on their own. Rehnquist, who due to his respirator from his recent illness was tastelessly -- but accurately -- dubbed "Justice Vader" by one person at the court, said very little.

In what I'm sure is certainly a Supreme Court first, the justices asked, "what about the iPod?" Both counsels used hypothetical examples like, "so I want a file and you have it on your computer," that I thought introduced the fun idea of sharing music online with Supreme Court justices. Of course, I haven't seen their iPods, but I suspect the Justices and I have different taste in music anyway.

The justices seemed comfortable with the technology at hand which was something I was worried about going in. They seemed to solid understand of the technological issues in the case. The only tech slip I caught was a bit of "bits and bytes" confusion uttered by Grokster's counsel.

Minus this minor slip, Richard Taranto did what I think was a very good job. The justices seemed quite upset with the fact that certain issues in the case has been bifurcated at an early stage in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and decided separately -- something that was done with agreement of both parties and court at the time. If this really is the court's largest problem with Grokster's case, we're in a good position. I'll echo what Fred von Lohmann said afterward and say that I believe that the justices asked all of correct questions. I'm ready to be cautiously optimistic as we wait until this summer to hear the decision.

I will not be totally surprised if the court decides to tweak or add a little bit to Betamax but I think there seemed to be agreement by most involved that Betamax was a pretty good idea overall. Evidently, Jack Valenti, who autographed one of Seth Schoen's Betamax tapes on the way in to court, even gave the nod to that.

If the decision comes down against us, it will obviously be a very bad thing. I'm not primarily concerned, as most people seem to be, in the loss of technologists ability to innovate -- although it does concern me. What I am very worried about is the local effects on P2P technologies. I've recently launched a few popular websites and if it had instead been popular videos and not ten kilobyte chunks of HTML, I would now be faced with paying for a five or six figure bandwidth bill -- unless I used P2P.

P2P is essential technology for spreading and democratizing the distribution of media with any sizable footprint on the disk. The technology for the grassroots and democratic production of information is quickly becoming a reality and if P2P technology is killed now, video and audio makers without record deals or deep pockets become voiceless and helpless. Of course, this is a risk of that the RIAA and MPAA are more than willing to take.

However, I'm also concerned with what will happen if Grokster wins. I'm afraid that a decisive court loss for the entertainment industry will help make the industry lobbyists increasingly effective in pushing congress toward anti-P2P, anti-technology, pro-industry and legislation like the INDUCE act.

In closing, I want to send many thanks to everyone who helped make this case possible and to everyone who helped make sure it was argued so well on our side. Also thanks should go to the folks from CEA for organizing a little demonstration that went head to head with the music-industry's demonstration and to Public Knowledge who organized and sponsored a great little post-argument shindig for all of the good guys and their supporters.

There are two blog entries that have been at this URL and, unfortunately, I'm not sure which one you're looking for. It could be one of these two:

• Grokster v. MGM Oral Arguments Report about the case argued at the Supreme Court
• SCOTUS v. The Public about my experience visiting the court itself