copyright

As most of you know, I am not at all a fan of our current copyright laws. I believe in sampling and remixing and I'm a huge fan of the work of Lawrence Lessig and the Creative Commons.

But I'm also a fan of Schadenfreude. So it' with great pleasure that I read today that Jackson Browne is suing John McCain for copyright infringement for using his song "Running on Empty" in an Obama attack ad without permission.

As it stands, McCain has now been caught pirating content from:

• Jackson Browne
• Mike Myers
• John Mellancamp
• John Hall (of Hall and Oates fame)

Just to add in your daily dose of irony, this comes out on the same day that John McCain released his technology platform. Here's what McCain's platform says about intellectual property and piracy:

John McCain Will Protect The Creative Industries From Piracy.
The entertainment industry is both a vital sector of the domestic economy and among the largest U.S. exporters. While the Internet has provided tremendous opportunity for the creators of copyrighted works, including music and movies, to distribute their works around the world at low cost, it has also given rise to a global epidemic of piracy. John McCain supports efforts to crack down on piracy, both on the Internet and off.

So in a McCain administration we would expect to see the President vigorously pursue charges against himself, right?

This is slightly off topic, but Professor Lawrence Lessig, famous for his work on copyright, has decided for the next 10 years to focus his efforts on battling corruption. This is his first lecture on the subject.

He's talking about corruption in government (money in politics), but also more generally about corruption in the sense that money incentivizes certain practices that it shouldn't, creating failures in supposedly free and peer-reviewed markets.

In light of what has been uncovered in the student loan industry, contractors in Iraq, and the failures of our government to take action on global warming despite an overwhelming scientific consensus on the subject, this seems particularly relevant. Lessig is making important points about the underlying reasons as to why our government is failing on these issues that are of such high concern to young voters.

Towards the end he gets at solutions, giving props to new organizations that use technology and peer production to increase transparency in the system, like MAPLight, and the Sunlight Foundation, but ultimately sees traditional reform and new technology as only part of the solution. Most specifically he's calling for us to figure out how to change the cultural norms that enable corruption. It's a long lecture, but the 65 minutes is well worth your time.

On a related note - check out this NY Times article about Students for a Free Culture, a Lessig-inspired student copyright organization.

For your afternoon viewing pleasure. And if you've missed it, YouTube is planning to depose both Stewart and Colbert in their case against Viacom.