Clinamen

We asked, and they acted. Change.gov, the Obama Transition Website, is now published under a Creative Commons license. I'm pretty amazed at how quickly this change happened. The Obama Transition folks heard the call and answered quickly.

Link via Lessig Blog.

Harvard faculty will soon vote on whether arts and sciences professors can distribute their scholarship online:

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.

I'm not sure this is the greatest idea. Is the idea that they are cutting out the peer review process altogether? It doesn't seem (based on this NYTimes piece) that these articles will be vetted at all. Peer review is what academic journals provide to both contributors and readers - that's worth something. But this is my favorite part of the article:

The publishing industry, as well as some scholarly groups, have opposed some forms of open access, contending that free distribution of scholarly articles would ultimately eat away at journals’ value and wreck the existing business model. Such a development would in turn damage the quality of research, they argue, by allowing articles that have not gone through a rigorous process of peer review to be broadcast on the Internet as easily as a video clip of Britney Spears’s latest hairdo.

The Motion Picture Association of America has been claiming that college students account for 44% of illegal film downloading. It turns out their numbers were bogus.

This puts a new spin on Andrew Keen's belly-aching that "traditional media" has to operate at a different standard. What's the difference between the MPAA cooking the books in order to pressure universities to hand over student data and bloggers publishing shoddy information?

4C's is over, and after a lost suitcase and several delayed flights, I'm pissed at United Airlines. I had to do my presentation in the same clothes I'd been wearing for 24 hours, and my bag didn't show up until a full day after I landed. NOT awesome. But the presentation went well, and we had great attendance. This is something to be thankful for..for which to be thankful...(see Collin's Blog about poor attendance at his featured panel on Saturday).

On to more important things. So, this always happens to me. I pick up a book, and then I start to think that I'm the subject of some Pynchon novel. The whole world starts to revolve around the book I'm reading (has anyone seen the movie "23"? Don't...it actually made me want to throw up. For real.) Anyway, I was looking for a novel to read on the plane, and I picked up Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude. I'm about 60 pages in when ddd emails me this story about Jonathan Lethem releasing the movie rights to his latest book (You Don't Love Me Yet)with the understanding that those rights go into the public domain five years after the film's release. This means that people can be making plays (or other films?) five years after someone has adapted his book.

It also turns out that Lethem wrote the piece in Harper's about copyright that Lessig mentioned on his visit here and that I've been meaning to read. See? Whole world...revolving around me, errr, the book I'm reading.

So, Lethem is fighting the good fight when it comes to the ridiculousness of copyright. A couple of quotes from the interview were particularly interesting to me, including this one about how art is both "commodity" and "gift":
Jonathan Lethem

"participating in culture by making stuff is inherently a gift transaction and a commodity transaction. And it always will be. The question is how do we affirm and clarify this relationship? Because it's a very weird one -- making commodities that are also gifts."

This of course reminds me of Derrida's ruminations on the gift (I'll spare you). Then there's this other quote that makes me think that Lethem has been reading Richard Lanham's The Economics of Attention:

"The economy of human attention is a very precious one, much scarcer than any other. I'm lucky to be in the position of having anyone notice that I've given something away in the first place."

One more cool note about Lethem's novel. There's an indie rock band at the center of the story, and Lethem's novel includes some song lyrics. Lethem released these lyrics to see if folks would make some music to go with them, and of course someone did.