Larry Lessig just announced that he’s finished his brief to the Supreme Court on the Eldred case, which will challenge the indefinite extension of copyright (Irving Berlin’s copyright will last for 140+ years).
He describes the value of Creative Commonw with an hilarious anaecdote: He set up a Morpheus server in his office at Stanford to distribute the transcripts of his speech, and he got a panicked call from the Network Police. “There’s illegal activity going on in your office! Someone is running a Morpheus server!” His response:
Look, it’s still legal in the United States people people to voluntarily make their content available online. The network police clearly thought that this is bizarre, the idea that someone believes that content can be made avialable for free to others. Most people don’t distinguish between perfect control and no control.
When Valenti describes “The terrorist war against the most important industry in America,” he’s right, but he’s got the wrong industry. The entertainment borg is attempting to crush the most innovative, valuable industry in the country: the technology industry.
Tim O’Reilly’s announced that he’s going to offer his authors the ability to put their material under a 14-year “Founder’s Copyright,” which, for authors that agree, will put all O’Reilly books into the Creative Commons public domain license in 14 years. He got a standing ovation.
Now, David Reed is talking about Open Spectrum, and the idea that radio-waves pass through one another — interference is what happens when a receiver is confused. With good technology, the capacity of a slice of spectrum increases with the number of transceivers operating in that spectrum . This is a commons in which the sheep shit grass. The FCC regulates spectrum as though use of spectrum reduces it, but the reverse is true.
When our radios collaborate with software-defined radio spectrum scarcity vanishes. We need spectrum that we can do anything we want to, a “spectrum commons.”
(The EtherPEG view of the zeitgeist is full of digital photos of the stage, which someone is uploading to his/her site, presumably)