Friday, December 15, 2006

You don't have to steal this book about Internet law & regulation Stanford prof Lawrence Lessig has updated his book "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" under the title "Code v2," with the help of an online community collaborating through Wiki software. The end result is a text licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike form of copyright -- which means Lessig is making the text available for free downloading as a PDF file or through the original Wiki. If you get tired of toting your laptop around to read the book, you can even buy a printed version for $15 or so. Lessig was the keynote speaker for last year's AEJMC conference in San Francisco, warning that overly-restrictive intellectual property laws stifle creativity and create a "read-only" culture. According to the "about" page for the book: "While Lessig himself has strong views about preserving important liberties that cyberspace originally protected, this book does not push any particular set of values. Unlike Lessig's other books, The Future of Ideas, and Free Culture, this book has no particular political agenda. Instead, the objective of Code v1 and Code v2 is to introduce and defend a particular way of understanding regulation, and to describe the trend that we should expect regulation in cyberspace to take." 1:40:30 PM     Amanda not a 'news bimbo,' Times reviewer says In the first article I've seen to favorably compare someone to Walter Cronkite, Rosalind Russell (as reporter Hildy Johnson), and "an earnest seventh grader," The New York Times has a colorful and positive review of Amanda Congdon's ABCnews.com debut. The review throws a lot adjectives at the former Rocketboom anchor: The word "taut" describes Amanda's T-shirt, not her delivery style. Amanda is ABC's "groovy young girlfriend." She's also slim and "swan-necked," for what that's worth. But the bottom line of Virginia Heffernan's take on Amanda is: "She's plainly an enthusiast: for new media, for old media, for Amanda Congdon, for the possibility of being smart and pretty at the same time and furthermore doing something cool and kind of like weird." (The cool/weird phrase echoes some of Amanda's delivery style quoted earier in the article.) Speaking of style, now that I've read Heffernan's article I'm going to visit her work more often. I generally dodge the opinion pages, but not only does this writer have a way with words, she could save me a lot of time on the couch, if the paper's description of her job is accurate: "With television and the Internet converging at last, who's going to watch all this here-goes-nothing online video? Virginia Heffernan covers everything from political propaganda videos to nip slips (the popular video of, yup, celebrities revealing their breasts)." Did Virginia coin the great line "Imitation is the sincerest form of television"? No, but she uses it well, even if she doesn't footnote Fred Allen. Newspapers traditionally don't do footnotes, and maybe the line is old enough to be an ironic part of the language of TV reviewers. Or maybe the late Mr. Allen didn't have as clear a claim on the remark as the online quote sites think. (Could be a modest conference paper in there for some vita-building grad student... preferably one with a sense of humor.) 1:20:40 PM

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