Simon Willison's Weblog: lawrence-lessig

What happened: Hillary’s view

2017-10-09T15:25:16+00:00

Lawrence Lessig’s review of Hillary Clinton’s book, including his thoughts on the failures of commercial media in covering the story of Russian interference during those crucial closing weeks before the election.

Tags: lawrence-lessig

Free licenses upheld by US "IP" court

2008-08-14T09:33:49+00:00

Free licenses upheld by US "IP" court

Free software and CC licenses which dictate conditions that, when violated, turn you in to a copyright infringer now have precedence in US law.

Tags: copyright, creative-commons, freesoftware, law, lawrence-lessig, licensing, open-source, uslaw

Lawrence Lessig on the West Wing

2005-02-10T12:36:03+00:00

Lawrence Lessig on the West Wing

Rather strange. Leaves you wondering where he left his flux capacitator.

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The Black and White about Grey Tuesday

2004-02-24T18:33:16+00:00

The Black and White about Grey Tuesday

Lessig on Illegal Art.

Via David Ely: Gray Tuesday

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Eldred Act Reasoning

2003-06-17T20:04:57+00:00

Lawrence Lessig explains why the proposed Eldred Act does not go further in its aims to reclaim the public domain.

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The Eric Eldred act

2003-01-18T16:29:02+00:00

Larry Lessig has a new campaign: a "copyright tax" that kicks in 50 years in to a copyright term, demanding copyright owners to pay a nominal fee ($1 - $50) to maintain control of their copyright. Unused works that are no longer profitable should then default to falling in to the public domain, while more commercial works can stay copyrighted. Larry's idea was first announced in this New York Times Op-Ed and is also covered on Lessig's blog. He has also published an FAQ.

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Creative Commons copyright link

2002-12-19T00:41:31+00:00

It's great to see the Creative Commons getting an overwhelmingly positive reception - as Lessig says on his blog, 'Tis the season to be giving, and this will be a great gift to the Commons. If you haven't seen their explanatory flash animation, Get Creative, you should really check it out.

That said, I have to admit I have a few reservations about the machine readable form of the CC licenses. The recommended way of including them in a page is RDF embedded in a comment, similar to Moveable Type's Trackback system. This is fine for HTML documents (although it feels like a bit of a cludge) but is problematic when used with XHTML. Why? Because XHTML documents are XML documents, and the XML specification states that an XML processor may, but need not, make it possible for an application to retrieve the text of comments. The logical way of extracting Creative Commons information from an XHTML document would be to parse it with an XML processor, but it is likely that many processors will be unable to extract the comments (and even those with the ability to extract them will not treat them as XML, requiring a second run of the XML parser to extract information from the RDF). In practical terms this is unlikely to be a problem as regular expressions can be used instead, but from an idealogical point of view it leaves something of a bad taste in the mouth.

If I'm going to criticise the embedded RDF approach I should probably suggest an alternative. The HTML 4 specification describes a "Copyright" link type which is defined as follows:

Copyright

Refers to a copyright statement for the current document.

I suggest using a link element in the <head> section of a document which points to the Creative Commons license governing the page in question (or to an RDF document similar to that currently used by the embedded comments method). If you view source on your page you will see that I have done exactly that.

Tags: creative-commons, lawrence-lessig

Striking the 1976 act

2002-12-09T12:18:45+00:00

Lawrence Lessig:

Jason Schultz has done more amazing work calculating any "chaos" that would come from striking the 1976 Act. Using the Internet Movie Database, he confirmed the Copyright Office's numbers that about 37,000 movies were released in the period 1927-46. (IMDb reports 36,386). Of those, only 2,480 are currently available in any format, or 6.8%. 93.2% of the films during that period are are commercially dormant.

Tags: lawrence-lessig

Free the mouse

2002-10-07T13:48:33+00:00

On Wednesday, Laurence Lessig will take on the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft. He will probably lose, but I sure hope he doesn't. Last night I watched Lessig's <free culture> keynote presentation from OSCon (made available in Flash format by Leonard Lin) with my girlfriend, and I've been catching up on the case with this Wired article and MSNBC's Glitterati vs Geeks. Lessig's blog has some interesting links as well.

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The Lessig debate

2002-08-18T11:08:27+00:00

I watched Laurence Lessig's OSCON keynote the other day (an 8.4MB Flash file courtesy of Leonard Lin). A transcript of the session is also available. It was an excellent presentation and really opened my eyes to the issues facing intellectual property in the United States. It also appears to have raised some hackles - Dave Winer took offence to the implication that developers had not done anything about the problem, and Doc Searls has responded to Dave's criticism with some interesting background information on Lessig.

Tags: dave-winer, docsearls, lawrence-lessig, leonard-lin