Lawrence Lessig all day. Including, most recently, Jail Time in the Digital Age, an Op-Ed in the New York Times. A guy like Lessig almost makes me want to pack it all in and go to law school.
Poking around at
the O’Reilly Network and associated sites this morning. Bopping around from politics to introductions to things I’m starting to play with and stuff. So far, I’ve come across the following interesting new (and no so new) stuff: The CSS Anarchist Strikes Again!; Is Open Source Un-American?; a bunch of OnLamp PHP articles; and Code + Law: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig.
If you’re interested in
peer to peer developments but missed the big conference a few weeks ago, go directly to Graeme Thickins’ O’Reilly P2P Conference Report. It’s an excellent account of the proceedings, including tons of quotes. My favourite bit was the recap of Lawrence Lessig’s presentation.
Wired is running
a fantastic story about Lawrence Lessig’s speech at the Ninth World Wide Web conference in Amsterdam. One thing that he neglects to mention but forms the backdrop of the whole story is that the Telecom Reform Act (the one that the CDA came packaged within) explicitly paved the way for AT&Ts current behaviour. That should have been a bigger story than the CDA at the time – it sure is now. By allowing mergers and combinations in the telecom space that were previously illegal, it opened the door to many really cool business combos that weren’t possible before. But it also raised the spectre of a virtually private network that could be controlled by capital in ways that the net cannot be. And, really, who needs CDA-style censorship when you have a closed network in the first place?
