Cranor is an associate research professor in the School of Computer Science and the department of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University.

She was the principal technical staff member at AT&T Lab’s Secure Systems Research program and with four others, studied how unauthorized copies of movies were, and are, being distributed online.

“Part of the reason we were looking was because we suspected there would be some insider leaks,” she told p2pnet at the time, “but not so many.”

Of a total of 285 movies she and her team sampled, 77% were leaked by industry insiders.

She co-edited the seminal book Security and Usability and founded the Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), says the EFF, going on:

“Cranor has authored over 80 research papers on online privacy, phishing and semantic attacks, spam, electronic voting, anonymous publishing, usable access control, and other topics. She has also testified as an expert in lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of Internet ‘harmful to minors’ laws. “In 2003, Cranor was named one of the top 100 innovators 35 or younger by Technology Review magazine.”

Buckman founded Creative Commons-backed Magnatune.com, “an online record label that strives to be fair to both recording artists and consumers alike,” says the EFF.

He also started Bookmooch.com, “an online community for the exchanging of used books.”

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Also See:

distributed online – MPAA’s ‘unethical practices’, August 29, 2007

insider leaks – Analysis of Security Vulnerabilities in the Movie Production and Distribution Process, September 13, 2003

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UPDATE

I’ve had several emails on p2pnet’s shut-down., one of which said the writer had been told I’ve sold the site this is just a prelude to a complete shut-down until p2pnet reopens under new management

I don’t know where that came from. But it’s really simple: I’m just taking a break. Publishing p2pnet, and writing most of the copy, day after day, week in week out, is a lot of work and I was reaching the burn-out point. So I’m taking these few days off to recharge my batteries, and nothing more.

Also, I’ve been getting up anywhere between 2:30 and 3:30 in the morning and my average working day is 10 or 11 hours, and often longer. But when I re-boot the Monday after next, I plan to start later in the morning and try to maintain a slightly more relaxed schedule.

I’ve been getting up at that time because I live on Vancouver Island in western Canada and the early start let me reach people in the eastern part of the country, who are three hours ahead of me, and in Europe, generally some eight hours ahead. However, as of August 20, p2pnet will be kicking off later than previously.

On my stomach troubles, it’s no big deal. After only a few days of treatment with natural remedies and by being careful about what I eat, it’s already significantly better. And that’s the way I intend to keep it.

“I’ll be around and checking my email every now and then, but I don’t plan to do any posting,” I said when I told you I was going offline for a short period, and a couple of people asked why I couldn’t maybe do just two to three posts a day.

Frankly, I want a break. But I’ll try to do a few non-work-intensive posts along the lines of the p2pnet news roundups.

I probably won’t do them every day, and I won’t aim for any particular time, but at least there’ll be links to at least some of news and events p2pnet would have tried to touch on.

So, Cheers! And thanks for your good wishes. See you on the 20th

Jon

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Hi everyone:

For the first time in 12 years or so, I’m taking a break of longer than one or two days and this’ll be the last post until Monday, August 20.

I’ll be around and checking my email every now and then, but I don’t plan to do any posting.

A couple of weeks ago, I was having a lot of pain and it turns out my stomach is building me an ulcer. Nice of it But strangely, it was good news, not bad: I was worried it was something rather more serious.

Anyhow, hopefully, the time off will do me some good, and I can certainly use the break: there are lots of things I’ve been putting off at home and elsewhere

If anything really important comes up (as far as the corporate cartels are concerned, anyway) Ray Beckerman at Recording Industry versus The People has promised to do a post. Thanks, Ray, and thanks Chris.

For now, Cheers! And thanks. And all the best …

Jon Newton

The little gadget was bootleg gold, a secret treasure I’d spent months tracking down. The miniOne looked just like Apple’s iPhone, down to the slick no-button interface. But it was more. It ran popular mobile software that the iPhone wouldn’t. It worked with nearly every worldwide cellphone carrier, not just AT&T, and not only in the U.S. It promised to cost half as much as the iPhone and be available to 10 times as many consumers. The miniOne’s first news teases—a forum posting, a few spy shots, a product announcement that vanished after a day—generated a frenzy of interest online. Was it real? When would it go on sale? And most intriguing, could it really be even better than the iPhone?

Saudis block liberal Internet forum, says activist

A Saudi political reform activist said on Thursday the authorities had blocked his Internet forum as part of a wider crackdown on freedom of expression in Saudi Arabia. “I want to put government bodies and public opinion in our country before the facts of how certain elements are infringing human rights,” Ali al-Dumaini said in a statement published on blog sites.

Howard on internet porn crusade

[Australian Prime Minister] John Howard is going to spend $189 million on “cleaning up the internet” for Australian families, blocking pornography, upgrading the search for chat-room sex predators and cutting off terror sites. Every Australian family will be provided with a free internet filter and the federal Government will enter an unprecedented partnership with service providers to filter pornography at the source.

Mass pump-and-dump scam causes spam level surge

Experts at SophosLabs … have warned of a huge spam campaign in the last 24 hours, designed to manipulate the share price of a company which sells wireless products to young people. Sophos reports that the scale of the spam campaign is so great that it has resulted in the amount of spam seen by its global traps rising by 30% in the last 24 hours.

Blockbuster acquires Movielink

Although Blockbuster Inc.’s Total Access program has been adding subscribers faster than Netflix Inc.’s DVD rental service, Netflix was able to tout that only it offered the ability to instantly download movies and TV shows to a computer. Not for long. Blockbuster said Wednesday it is buying the digital movie-download service Movielink, giving it a stronger online foothold to compete with its rival.

TV Channels Move to Web, Think Outside the Cable Box

When the Black Family Channel launched on cable television in 1999, its executives and celebrity investors – including boxer Evander Holyfield and the Jackson Five’s Marlon Jackson — had big plans to bring socially responsible TV shows to African-Americans. But in May, the Black Family Channel said it was abandoning TV, and instead would become an online-only channel. Despite some inroads – it eventually reached 16 million homes – the Atlanta-based company had struggled to get cable providers to offer the channel in enough homes to attract advertisers.

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It’ll work like this: if someone accidentally scrolls over a link, the display time to will be a tiny .5 seconds, and I think that does it.

In addition, you’ll only be seeing ’standard’ ads, not the kinds which are increasingly part of a growing number of online offerings offerings —– spurious ‘all you can eat’ MP3 or movie downloads, for example, or ways to increase the size of various parts of the human anatomy, male and female

What will you be seeing if you click on word or words underlined in dotted green?

Nothing offensive.

Here’s a list of some of the advertisers:

Adobe – Multiple products; AMD – Multiple products;Blackberry; Blu Ray; BMC lBoost Mobilel Brocade; CA; CableVision; Camtasia; CDW; ComCast; Microsoft; Hitachi; HP; Digital River; IBM; Intel; Sun; NetApp; Sprint; Toshiba ; Trend Micro; Xbox; Ubisoft; HD DVD; HGTV; and, American Express.

I’d also like to thank those who emailed me saying they understand why I need to include advertising, and also the people who posted comments saying much the same thing.

Sorry for all the to-ing and fro-ing

Cheers! And all the best …
Jon

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We’re having intermittent mysql connection problems which make it almost impossible to post stories. Reading them may be dodgy too. Sorry.

We’ll get the difficulties resolved as soon as possible, so please bear with us in meanwhile.

Cheers! And thanks …
Jon

The one-day legal forum,”will gather the top business and legal minds for ground-breaking discussions of the opportunities and associated legal risks arising from video distribution, social networking, user-generated content, and other Web 2.0 applications,” says the promo site.

“The forum will address monetization, intellectual property protection, privacy implications, and overall risk management in a series of interactive panel discussions and keynote addresses,” it says.

Glickman, who runs the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), is expected to address the impact of Web 2.0 on the motion picture industry, says the site.

He’ll be talking to content producers and distributors, Web 2.0 technology companies, traditional publishers, corporations, government agencies, academia, venture capital firms and law firms.

Other speakers include David Ardia, director and co-founder of the Citizen Media Law Project, Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society

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That’s to say, Grouper, an online video site bought by Sony Corp last year for $65 million, is turning into a kind of in-house talent-spotting agency with a new name: Crackle.

“Crackle’s comprehensive approach includes a unique programming and editorial strategy, wide-reaching global distribution platforms and collaboration with Sony Pictures Entertainment, the IMPROV Comedy franchise and other leading media companies,” says a statement, going on:

“We reward the best video creators with Crackle funding, promotion, syndication and even greater exposure to our large media partners.”

Animators will have access to artists from Sony Pictures Imageworks and Sony Pictures. Winners of the quarterly contest on Wet Paint, Crackle’s animation channel, “will receive a cash prize and fly to Los Angeles to pitch Sony Pictures Animation executives for a chance to have their animated short theatrically released,” it says.

They’ll also attend Siggraph, the computer graphics conference in August next year.

Says the statement:

A Crackle Studios development deal and a much sought-after pitch meeting with Columbia Pictures will be awarded on Shorts, Crackle’s Short Film channel. Quarterly contest winners will receive funding from Crackle Studios to develop and produce short form material for Crackle distribution. Winners will also fly to Los Angeles to pitch their feature film concepts to Columbia creative executives. A similar Crackle Studios development deal will also be awarded on Moving Targets, Crackle’s upcoming sketch variety channel.

Quarterly contest winners will receive Crackle funding to develop projects for Crackle distribution. They will also meet with creative executives from Sony Pictures Television to pitch and present their television ideas.

The best emerging stand-up comedians spotlighted each month on High Wire, Crackle’s stand-up comedy channel, will win a chance to be center stage at the world famous IMPROV comedy clubs. They will have an opportunity to pitch their comedy shorts to creative executives of the IMPROV Comedy Lab (a new comedy centric broadband content studio) for final production and distribution.

The premier comedy club chain will offer one very hilarious contest winner a chance to fly either to LA, NY or Chicago to perform a 15 minute set on a hot ticket Thursday, Friday or Saturday night. of sale or service that are only notionally agreed to by consumers. It’s time that our laws reflected the reality of electronic commerce, not just some legal fiction.”

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Also See:
Crackled – Sony Pictures’ Crackle Bursts onto Scene and Screen with Pioneering Studio Model, July 16, 2007
$65 million – Sony gropes Grouper, August 23, 2006

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The comment spam problem has been dramatically reduced now p2pnet is running under WordPress.

It used to be that first thing in the morning, I’d manually delete scores of comment spams which had escaped the (hated) verification system.

Thanks to Akismet Spam, though, that’s a thing of the past. The application cleverly identifies 99% of the garbage and marks it for deletion.

But there’s a slight problem.

I haven’t been using Akismet for long but already it’s identified almost 6,000 incomings. This means hardly a day goes by without the arrival of hundreds of new spam comments.

Theoretically, I should go through every one of them just to make sure a genuine post hasn’t been inadvertently flagged. I do my best but frankly, I just don’t have the time to be as diligent as I perhaps should be.

So if you’ve sent in a comment post and it hasn’t turned up, it probably wasn’t you: it may have been accidentally chopped.

However, having said this, I don’t think that’s happened very often and I’m pretty sure 99.99999% of regular readers will agree that having an effective spam killer around is a whole lot better than having to prove you’re human by entering five letters and numbers, like you had to do under the old system.

Cheers!
Jon

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Every day there are stories I didn’t get to. I try to tie into them next time around, but I don’t always make it so from now on, when necessary, I’m going to do my best to make the final post a mini-roundup.

Here’s the first such:

Cheers!
Jon

===============================

The 20 Worst Windows Features of All Time

Say no more

Microsoft Surface Parody

One-day your computer will be a big-assed table ….

Bronx man’s first bust under stiff new piracy law

Kalidou Diallo, 48, was charged with the new anti-piracy misdemeanor after he was arrested Monday night at a sneak preview of the blockbuster film.

Using a hidden camcorder hooked up to a digital recorder, Diallo tried to covertly record the film at the American Theater on East Ave. in Parkchester, police said.

IPhone: The Musical

David Pogue ditches his old cellphone for the iPhone in this sing-a-long sequel.

Consumerist Catches Geek Squad Stealing Porn From Customer’s Computer

The Consumerist’s 3-month sting operation snared a Geek Squad technician stealing porn from our hard drive, and we’ve got the work-safe video and logfiles to prove it.

‘Simpsons’ pic features Bart in the buff

The upcoming Simpsons movie takes a typically irreverent dig at religion and environmentalists, and features a nude scene involving Bart that had the audience at a preview show applauding.

Apple Sued for Artistic Copyright Infringement

Apple may be in trouble with its Apple TV set top player and the iTunes store. Two lawsuits filed this week claim that Apple knowingly infringed on copyrights, one of which belongs to a Louis Psihoyos, an artistic photographer. The second suit is a civil complaint that claims Apple along with pop star Avril Lavigne of knowingly infringing on a song written in 1979.

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The changes are obvious, the most important being instead of having everything dumped into one archive, articles are now categorized.

It’s going to take me quite a while to get everything updated into the right sections – there are thousands of different posts on all kinds of topics to deal with – but I hope it won’t take too long to get properly sorted.

Also, I’m afraid anyone who’s registered will need to register again. Sorry about that.

Registration allows people to put their names, or nicknames, on comment posts and when p2pnet first went online, I made a conscious decision to exclude logs. I couldn’t see a reason for them. I wanted to be able to speak freely and express myself freely, and how could I not extend the same freedom to anyone choosing to contribute two p2pnet in any way, including comment posts?

So, anonymity will continue to be guaranteed and this new p2pnet does not, and will not, keep logs of comment posts. Full stop. Period. End of story.

P2P mean People to People

p2pnet is all about people being able to virtually talk to each other without restrictions. It was never, and still isn’t, entrepreneurial. It started life as a personal page but wasn’t long before writing copy for it took up most of my day (and many of my nights : ) and, thanks to the support of what were then the principle commercial p2p application companies, I was able to work on it 24/7, pay my mortgage and keep up with site expenses as they grew.

However, thanks largely to the ongoing depredations of the corporate music industry, only one of my original advertisers, Blubster, remains and the guy behind it, Pablo Soto, has been a huge help over and beyond any benefit he may have derived from his ad.

I was also getting help from a small group of people in Britain who had to drop their contributions just before Christmas last year, when I came close to having to sell the site. Then, “I think p2pnet may pull through, with a bit of luck,” I said. “It’ll be a completely new deal, but that’s cool and for the best. Change is what it’s all about. Anything which stands still eventually rots. Ask the cartels : )”

Thanks to an American supporter who’s elected to keep his identity to himself, for the time being, p2pnet is still around, and still completely independent.

Janie Mehew created the original content management system, which has somehow kept going against all odds, including increases in traffic, design alterations, moves to new hosts, and so on.

Sixto Luis Santos made several major improvements in the CMS, but it’s been evident for some time that further upgrades, if not a complete rebuild, were absolutely necessary. And as you can see, that’s now in hand, thanks to Bob Bryant, an American programmer who’s been keeping the p2pnet wheels turning for the past few months.

We have a few things to deal with, for example getting the newsletter going again, but what you see see is basically what you’ll be getting.

A lot of people have also contributed, and continue to contribute occasionally and regularly.

They include (in no particular order – the indomitable and irreverent catflap, whereabouts unknown; Bill Evans, who founded boycott-riaa.com; UK student Daniel Hudson; Australian lawyers Sally Hawkins and Alex Malik; Alex H, also in Australia; Benedek Toth in Hungary; Free/Libre and Open Source Software enthusiast, author and promoter Russell McOrmond in Canada; VA pensioner Tom Poe in the US; entertainment lawyer Fred Wilhelms, US; Monty Icenogle, amateur radio call-sign KD6CAE, US; and, Chris Ovenden, a self-confessed technology freak and musician in the UK.

Again in no special order, huge thanks also go to Bill Thompson (UK); Rob Hyndman (Canada); Michael Geist (Canada); Susan Crawford (US); Howard Knopf (Canada); Torrentfreak (Holland); Bob Lefsetz; Jack Spratts, Australia; and, Ashlee Vance (The Register, US) all of whom are experts in their own fields, and online publishers, who allow me to run their original material in p2pnet, and some of whom are also of tremendous help in the sidelines.
And p2pnet net would not, of course, be what it is without the thousands of people who’ve anonymously, and by name, added their comments to posts.

Meanwhile …

If p2pnet is to survive, obviously there has to be an income, and that means advertising, always a contentious issue. I’d rather not have to rely on it, but I have a family as well as site to support, and so ads are necessary.

I’ve never done more than break even, and I don’t expect to become rich from p2pnet. However, I hope the income from ads will allow me to to get into a position where I can hire at least one other person to help produce/edit material on a regular basis.

Now stories are going into specific sections, I’m hoping I’ll be able to attract advertisers, but I promise you’ll never see pop-ups, annoying videos in the middle of stories, images floating around while you’re trying to read, or stuff like that.

Finally, several times in the past I’ve been criticised because of the undeniable fact a lot of posts have very definite perspectives.

That isn’t going to change.

“Your continual diatribes have become extremely tiresome, and so have you,” said one complaint. “Please give it a rest,” and, “I would like to see Mr. Newton stop to[u]ting himself as being ‘unbiased,” said another, going on “In many instances, this blog is like Fox News: it claims to be ‘fair and balanced’ and ‘without bias’ but a more accurate claim would be ‘biased in the opposite direction’,” and, “calling yourself ‘unbiased’ when in reality your are just biased in a direction opposite that of the mainstream is just being dishonest in my opinion.”

I responded, in part:

When and where have I ever said I was unbiased? I’m as biased as they come, I’ve explicitly said so on a number of occasions, and I’ve never pretended to be otherwise.

I’m biased against any and all efforts to kill free speech, online or off. I’m biased against the entertainment cartels as they pretend to be honest businesses trying to earn an honest living. I’m biased against their efforts to penetrate school classrooms to spread their poisonous ‘educational’ programs, claiming they represent decent standards for children to follow. I’m biased against the one-sided reporting by many, if not most, elements of the mainstream media who DO pretend to be fair, balanced and unbiased. I’m biased against attempts to flood us with tricky Net advertisements designed to force themselves past our natural barriers of free choice. And I could go on : )

I’m biased … Most definitely. And since you mention Fox, where does it afford viewers a chance to air their opinions, named or otherwise, without without edits? On p2pnet, though, anyone can comment freely, whatever their views. Ask Gachnar and others like him/her. And that’s the way it’s always been.

A revised p2pnet is on the way and it’ll have both forums and comment posts for articles. You’ll have to register for the first, but the second will allow anonymous posting, as ever.

So far, no one has ever offered to submit anything offering the corporate perspective. If and when one such comes along, I’ll run it untouched just as I do other papers and articles.

Meanwhile, I’ll continue to call it like I see it …

Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom ~ Benjamin Nathan Cardozo – American jurist (1870–1938)

That’s it for now.

Stay tuned.

Jon Newton – p2pnet

They’re satirical impostors posing as large corporations or organizations (think: ExxonMobil, The World Trade Organization, Dow Chemical, etc) in real settings, highlighting their hypocrisies and contradictions.

“Much of their chicanery occurs with fake websites where they accept invitations to speak at conferences, with the press, or other public settings,” says Thessaly La Force, one of their most enthusiastic supporters.

“They got their start when they switched the voice boxes between GI Joe Ken and Barbie Doll before Christmas, and before that, when one of them added men kissing in the background of a violent video game.”

heh. Can’t be bad But now they’re looking for a sysadmin, and to relocate their server,.

Why’s that?

Because 24 hours after the Yes Men joked that ExxonMobil planned to turn billions of climate-change victims into a brand-new fuel called Vivoleum, Broadview Networks, the Yes Men’s upstream ISP, shut down Vivoleum.com, turned off the Yes Men’s email service and demanded that they remove all mention of Exxon from TheYesMen.org before they’d restore the email service.

Says the group:

1. THE YES MEN’S SERVER NEEDS A NEW HOME.

Broadview Networks provides internet connectivity to New York’s Thing.net and the websites and servers it hosts, including the Yes Men’s server. Thing.net has been a host for many years to numerousactivist and artist websites and servers.

At the end of July, Thing.net will terminate its contract with Broadview and move its operations to Germany, where internet expression currently benefits from a friendlier legal climate than in the US, and where baseless threats by large corporations presumably have less weight with providers. At that time, the Yes Men and two other organizations with servers “co-located” at Thing.net will need a new home for those servers. Please write to us if you can offer

such help or know of someone who can.

2. THE YES MEN NEED A SYSADMIN.

The Yes Men are desperately in need of a sysadmin. The position is unpaid at the moment, but it shouldn’t take much time for someone who knows Debian Linux very well. It involves monitoring the server, keeping it up-to-date, making sure email is working correctly, etc. The person could also maintain the Yes Men’s website (which will be updated next week), if she or he wants.

Thing.net also needs a sysadmin: someone living in New York who knows Linux well. The Thing.net position involves some money and the rewards of working for an organization that has consistently and at great personal risk supported groups like the Yes Men over the years.

THE YES MEN AND THING.NET THANK YOU!

If this looks good to you, say Yes to the Yes Men at people@theyesmen.org.

And stay tuned.

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A couple of technical difficulties mean I’m going to have to shut down for a while.

Hopefully, it won’t be for long and normal service will soon be resumed : )

Cheers! And thanks …

Jon

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He says he’s shifting his academic work, largely inspired by Barack Obama, Al Gore and an anonymous “Republican of prominence in Washington”. But he’ll continue as ceo of the Creative Commons, and will remain on the board of iCommons, says N2N News.

Amplifying remarks he made during his keynote at the iCommons iSummit 07, Lessig blogs >>>>>>>>>

Six months ago, I was reading Obama’s (really excellent) latest book. In the beginning of the book, he describes his decision to run for the United States Senate. At that point, Obama had been in politics for about 10 years. Ten years, he reflected, was enough. It was either “up or out” for him. He gambled on the the “up.” We’ll see how far he gets.

But for me, Obama’s reflection triggered a different thought. It’s been a decade since I have become active in the issues I’m known for. Over this decade, I’ve learned a great deal. There has been important progress on the issues — not yet in Congress, but in the understanding of many about what’s at stake, and what’s important. Literally thousands have worked to change that understanding. When we began a decade ago, I would have said it was impossible to imagine the progress we’ve made. It is extraordinarily rewarding to recognize that my pessimism notwithstanding, we are going to prevail in these debates. Maybe not today, but soon.

That belief (some think, dream), then led me to wonder whether it wasn’t time to find a new set of problems: I had learned everything I was going to learn about the issues I’ve been working on; there are many who would push them as well, or better, than I; perhaps therefore it was time to begin again.

That thought triggered a second, this one tied to Gore.

In one of the handful of opportunities I had to watch Gore deliver his global warming Keynote, I recognized a link in the problem that he was describing and the work that I have been doing during this past decade. After talking about the basic inability of our political system to reckon the truth about global warming, Gore observed that this was really just part of a much bigger problem. That the real problem here was (what I will call a “corruption” of) the political process. That our government can’t understand basic facts when strong interests have an interest in its misunderstanding.

This is a thought I’ve often had in the debates I’ve been a part of, especially with respect to IP. Think, for example, about term extension. From a public policy perspective, the question of extending existing copyright terms is, as Milton Friedman put it, a “no brainer.” As the Gowers Commission concluded in Britain, a government should never extend an existing copyright term. No public regarding justification could justify the extraordinary deadweight loss that such extensions impose.

Yet governments continue to push ahead with this idiot idea — both Britain and Japan for example are considering extending existing terms. Why?

The answer is a kind of corruption of the political process. Or better, a “corruption” of the political process. I don’t mean corruption in the simple sense of bribery. I mean “corruption” in the sense that the system is so queered by the influence of money that it can’t even get an issue as simple and clear as term extension right. Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide. In the US, listening to money is the only way to secure reelection. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars.

The point of course is not new. Indeed, the fear of factions is as old as the Republic. There are thousands who are doing amazing work to make clear just how corrupt this system has become. There have been scores of solutions proposed. This is not a field lacking in good work, or in people who can do this work well.

But a third person — this time anonymous — made me realize that I wanted to be one of these many trying to find a solution to this “corruption.” This man, a Republican of prominence in Washington, wrote me a reply to an email I had written to him about net neutrality. As he wrote, “And don’t shill for the big guys protecting market share through neutrality REGULATION either.”

“Shill.”

If you’ve been reading these pages recently, you’ll know my allergy to that word. But this friend’s use of the term not to condemn me, but rather as play, made me recognize just how general this corruption is. Of course he would expect I was in the pay of those whose interests I advanced. Why else would I advance them? Both he and I were in a business in which such shilling was the norm. It was totally reasonable to thus expect that money explained my desire to argue with him about public policy.

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.

And so as I said at the top (in my “bottom line”), I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues: Namely, these. “Corruption” as I’ve defined it elsewhere will be the focus of my work. For at least the next 10 years, it is the problem I will try to help solve.

I do this with no illusions. I am 99.9% confident that the problem I turn to will continue exist when this 10 year term is over. But the certainty of failure is sometimes a reason to try. That’s true in this case.

Nor do I believe I have any magic bullet. Indeed, I am beginner. A significant chunk of the next ten years will be spent reading and studying the work of others. My hope is to build upon their work; I don’t pretend to come with a revolution pre-baked.

Instead, what I come with is a desire to devote as much energy to these issues of “corruption” as I’ve devoted to the issues of network and IP sanity. This is a shift not to an easier project, but a different project. It is a decision to give up my work in a place some consider me an expert to begin work in a place where I am nothing more than a beginner.

So what precisely does this mean for the work I am doing now?

First, and most importantly, I am not leaving Creative Commons, or the iCommons Project. I will remain on both boards, and continue to serve as CEO of Creative Commons. I will speak and promote both organizations whenever ever I can — at least until the financial future of both organizations is secure. I will also continue to head the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

But second, and over the next few months, I will remove myself from the other organizations on whose boards I now serve. Not immediately, but as I can, and as it makes sense.

Third, in general, I will no longer be lecturing about IP (whether as in TCP/IP or IPR) issues. No doubt there will be exceptions. In particular, I have a few (though because this decision has been in the works for months, very few) obligations through the balance of the year. There will be others in the future too. But in general, unless there are very strong reasons, I will not be accepting invitations to talk about the issues that have defined my work for the past decade.

Instead, as soon as I can locate some necessary technical help, I will be moving every presentation I have made (that I can) to a Mixter site (see, e.g., ccMixter) where others can freely download and remix what I’ve done, and use it however they like. I will continue to work to get all my books licensed freely. And I am currently finishing one last book about these issues that I hope will make at least some new contributions.

Fourth, these pages will change too. My focus here will shift. That will make some of you unhappy. I’m sorry for that. The blog is CC-BY licensed. You’re free to fork and continue the (almost) exclusively IP-related conversation. But I will continue that conversation only rarely. New issues will appear here instead.

Fifth, some will think this resolution sounds familiar. In the beginning of the Free Culture talk I gave at OSCON 5 years ago, I said that talk was going to be my last. In fact, what I intended at the time was the last before the argument in the Eldred case. In my nervousness, I didn’t make that intent clear then. The literally hundred of talks since (85 last year alone) should have made that obvious.

But again, this is not a resolution of silence. It is a decision to change channels. This new set of issues is, in my view, critically important. Indeed, I’m convinced we will not solve the IP related issues until these “corruption” related issues are resolved. So I hope at least some of you will follow to this new set of questions. For I expect this forum will be central to working out just what I believe, just as it has in the past.

Finally, I am not (as one friend wrote) “leaving the movement.” “The movement” has my loyalty as much today as ever. But I have come to believe that until a more fundamental problem is fixed, “the movement” can’t succeed either. Compare: Imagine someone devoted to free culture coming to believe that until free software supports free culture, free culture can’t succeed. So he devotes himself to building software. I am someone who believes that a free society — free of the “corruption” that defines our current society — is necessary for free culture, and much more. For that reason, I turn my energy elsewhere for now.

So thank you to everyone who has helped in this work. Thanks especially to everyone who will continue it. And thanks the most to those who will take positions of leadership in this movement, to help guide it to its success. Just one favor I ask in return: when you get to the promised land, remember to send a postcard.

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Also See:
N2N News – Lessig moves on from copyright fight, June 20, 2007
blogs – Required Reading: the next 10 years, June 19, 2007

If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.