I recognize I’m sounding like a broken record, but I think that developers of blogging software — and protocol developers, too, for that matter — should work Creative Commons licenses into RSS feeds as the default. Why?  For one thing, the copyright issues related to blogging and to syndication and aggregation of blogged content are…

Read more..

There’s big news today at the Berkman Center: Donna “Copyfight” Wentworth, long our public voice and our longest-running team member, has decided to head west — to EFF.  On the Center’s “team” list today, there’s been an outpouring of support and emotion of all sorts, from Berkmanites past and present.  We’ll all miss her terribly,…

Read more..

Dave Winer, on a critical aspect of the emerging blogspace: “We’re a house-divided for users but united on destruction.”  The entry of big players, like AOL and google, and their beta blogging tools, provides an opportunity for the use of truly interoperable standards — but, as Dave calls it, things might be breaking the other…

Read more..

“I think Terry’s proposal is terrific,” says Prof. Nesson.  “But the question is how can you get from here to there.  There are a lot of dead of bodies between here and there, and they aren’t dead yet.” Terry Fisher replies: “Something more dramatic, something of a lurch, is needed to get us to a better…

Read more..

A nice riff by iLaw attendee and venture capitalist David Hornik on yesterday’s conversation on whether the web makes democracy possible, with some good comments attached (see Gary Santoro’s, e.g.).

Read more..

Prof. Terry Fisher’s alternative compensation scheme — focused initially on the music industry and extensible to film, books and other forms of content — has four parts: Register, Tax, Count, Pay.  How much money would you have to raise to make this system work?   About $2.4 billion, he calculates.  Merits of such a system: large cost savings; elimination…

Read more..

“Here’s the point of the whole course: extraordinary things happen based on tiny changes.”  Like the fact that every act on the internet makes a copy.  “The net is a copying technology.  Bingo.  The world’s transformed.”  So says Prof. Lessig.  People were hanging on every word here.

Read more..

Chris Lydon has taken us big a step forward toward audio blogs with his exceptional piece on Ralph Waldo Emerson.  If you can, make time to hear it.  Dave Winer, Ben Walker and others at the Berkman Center have been pushing us ahead on audio blogs, and I’m sure they’ll persevere. I wrote my senior…

Read more..

Everytime I find myself in the Bay Area I find myself wondering why anyone ever leaves. Wow.  So pleasant. If you’re unlucky enough to be anywhere less pleasant, you can follow along with iLaw-Stanford, the 5th iteration of our intensive, week-long Internet Law course thanks to Donna‘s ongoing blogging. The highlight of what I’ve seen here today…

Read more..

Jim Moore is hitting ’em out of the park on ideas of emerging democracies.

Read more..

From the RIAA’s news release: “Starting tomorrow, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) will begin gathering evidence and preparing lawsuits against individual computer users who are illegally offering to ‘share’ substantial amounts of copyrighted music over peer-to-peer networks.”  By August, expect to see “thousands of lawsuits charging individual peer-to-peer music distributors with copyright infringement.”…

Read more..

Lots of smart and insightful people have commented on the Supreme Court decisions yesterday (on Affirmative Action and Internet filtering funding in particular).  One worth reading: Philip Greenspun.  Particularly on matters of education, Prof. Greenspun does not fail to provoke.  There’s often a good measure of satire in there as well, but I’m not sure…

Read more..