The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled that the Artistic License is enforceable! Happy day! The 16-page opinion is a good read.

From Lawrence Lessig:

So for non-lawgeeks, this won’t seem important. But trust me, this is huge.
[snip]
In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you’re simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses. Put precisely, whether or not they are also contracts, they are copyright licenses which expire if you fail to abide by the terms of the license.

Important clarity and certainty by a critically important US Court.

via reddit

Update:

orig photo by Sam Ogden

Filed under: all talk, lessig, no code, opensource · 1 Comment

May, Shag, and I went to the Creative Commons 5-Year Birthday Party and got to hear Lawrence Lessig announce a new CC License, CC Zero. Licensing a work under CC0 is similar to placing it in the Public Domain, but CC0 is meant to work better internationally. Did you know Germany (and maybe other EU countries) don’t allow authors to dedicate their own works into the public domain? I’m glad smart people are working on this problem!

The CC 5-Year party was cool, but the sound system was turned down so low that it was hard to hear Lessig and Gilberto Gil. Fortunately, DJ Spooky turned up the sound for his set, but that caused others to complain that they could no longer talk over the music.

Here’s the press release and wiki page for CC0 (where I got the CC0 image above). The tool to generate the CC0 machine-readable license should be available on Jan 15.

Lawrence Lessig’s blog has a list of the amazing number of announcements at the CC 5-Year party.

Filed under: archive, CC0, CCZero, CreativeCommons, lessig, san francisco · 0 Comments

I love this video. Jimmy Wales announces at the iCommons party that Wikipedia will become licensed under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license. The crowd, who has not been paying attention until now, goes nuts. Lawrence Lessig gets on the mic and and announces the third greatest thing to ever happen in his life.

(via)

Filed under: CreativeCommons, iCommons, inspiration, JimmyWales, lessig, ShareAlike, video, wikipedia · 0 Comments

For the last 10 years, Lawrence Lessig has been at the forefront of the Free Culture movement. At the iCommons summit, Lessig announced that he will stop working on Free Culture issues, and shift his work to fighting corruption:

I don’t want to be a part of that business. And more importantly, I don’t want this kind of business to be a part of public policy making. We’ve all been whining about the “corruption” of government forever. We all should be whining about the corruption of professions too. But rather than whining, I want to work on this problem that I’ve come to believe is the most important problem in making government work.

Best of luck, Professor Lessig! You make the world a better place, and we are all thankful! (via brewster)

Filed under: archive, corruption, FreeCulture, iCommons, inspiration, lessig · 0 Comments

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals just heard Kahle vs. Gonzales aka the “Orphan Works trial”. Lawrence Lessig did an amazing job arguing on behalf of Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive) and Rick Prelinger (Prelinger Flim Archives). The argument is quite complex, and I’m not a lawyer, so while I think of a way to summerize it, here are some pictures:

Inspiration:

This was my first time at the 9th Circuit:

It was also the first time I tied a tie! I used this video as a guide..

Update: Here is a write up at the Prelinger Library blog.

Update 2: Lawrence Lessig has written about the case here and here.

Filed under: archive, copyright, inspiration, lessig, NinthCircuit, photos · 5 Comments