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Lawrence Lessig Elected to FSF Board of Directors
Free Software Foundation writes "Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig was elected to the Free Software Foundation's Board of Directors on March 28, 2004.
With Eben Moglen, the two most prominent academic legal minds on the subject of copyleft licensing now both serve as Directors of the Foundation.
Professor Lessig's involvement will undoubtedly give a major boost to the FSF's ongoing efforts to neutralize legal threats to software freedom.
The official announcement is here."
Yes/No
t4c
GNAA claims responsibility for Momfuck virus.
By Horatio Brunswick
New York, NY - GNAA (Gay Nigger Association of America) The GNAA today claimed responsibility for the release of the devastating trojan Momfuck.1o1, which has caused an estimated 486 billion dollars US in lost productivity and unread penis enlargement offers.
In a drastic escalation of their widely criticized christmas island bombing campaign which has killed thousands of defenceless CI natives, the GNAA made vague threats last week in a "first post" on slashdot.org, a popular "news for trolls" website. In the post (not published here due to profanity and ascii nudity) the GNAA threatened the "Destruction of all internet" if net martyr http://www.goatse.cx was not immediately reinstated. Initally dismissed by self proclaimed security experts Cowboykneel and Linux Toreballs as a childish lark, the world was totally unprepared for the storm to come.
Momfuck.lol exploits three vulnerabilities within Linux's UPnP implementation: a remotely exploitable buffer overflow that allows an attacker gain SYSTEM level access to any default installation of Linux, a Denial of Service (DoS) attack, and a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Within hours of release, every backbone in the country had become infected with the virus, bringing the internet to a crashing halt. The DHS announced an orange alert when the virus spread to even such such remote non-countries as Canada and England, becomming a worldwide computer epidemic. The sequence of events that followed was devastating. ATMs in several states began routing funds from caucasian bank accounts into a GNAA controlled cayman islands account. Traffic lights in all major metropolitan areas malfunctioned, displaying pink rather than the standard red yellow and green configuration, causing unprecedented accidents and traffic delays. Radio stations ceased transmitting their standard programming and began a round the clock broadcast of a bootleg of the Village People's "YMCA" which was altered to "GNAA." Perhaps most horrifyingly, The FOX network's LOL sunday programming lineup was interrupted, and replaced by a graphic video of two men having anal sex, backed by the lyrics "Boom I got your boyfriend".
The FBI has fallen under heavy criticism for their failure to respond to the threat of the GNAA. The general public seems uwilling to accept their claims that the post was below their current threshold. The FBI's top cyber-security unit warned consumers and corporations Friday night to take new steps beyond those recommended by SCO Corp. to protect against hackers who might try to attack major flaws discovered in the newest version of Linux software, or to get a life, faggots. FBI Department head John Asscrotch is expected to resign in disgrace shortly.
What follows is a transcript of an actual internet relay chat conversation, with two individuals who seem to have been infected by momfuck.lol. It is my hope that this will help computer users to recognize and avoid the virus if encountered.
* Now talking in #eurotekken
* Topic is 'http://www.tekkenzaibatsu.com/forums/showthread.p hp?s=&postid=1527925#post1527925 : everyone give your 0.00c'
* Set by SirCane on Tue Apr 06 15:57:26
<l0de> "Mom, I can't sleep would you mind if I get in bed with you?
<l0de> I have virus!
<l0de> She was wearing a baby doll semi-see through nightie, and was embarrassed to let me in bed with her.
<subt-L> haha.. this is a fucking crazy virus..
<l0de> I can't type this fast!
<l0de> However she remembered how I had let her sleep with me when she needed to.
<l0de> Oh my god.
<l0de> "Sure John, it's a big bed," she said in an uncertain tone.
<l0de> "Mom, would you mind if I snuggle a little with you.
<l0de> I just feel kind of sad tonight, I need you close to me."
Buttplug! Buttplug! Buttplug! Buttplug!
Fuck you, I succeed it.
Props to GNAA.
RMS still on the FSF board is a true GNUsance...
Explain how. Is it because another bleeding heart liberal who's is given a post on a meaningless board is going to continue to do nothing except "advocate" free software? BFD.
5th post?
Lessig was elected two weeks ago and no one knew until today? How does that work out?
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I still think that Eben Moglen sounds like the beginning of that Def Leppard song.
I get nothing from the new guy. 'cept maybe "Less sig, more post"? On that note, I depart.
I think Lessig is one of the foremost thinkers when it comes to modern intellectual property law. His thoughts are, of course, more evolutionary than revolutionary and closer to the mainstream concepts of IP rights and responsibilities than many of us are aware. His ideas have great impact on the way many of us think about IP law.
However, his ideas are only effective within the walls of academia. He could actually enact through judicial activism many of the concepts and principles that he believes in if he were an actual judge.
Which begs the question, why would an obviously talented legal thinker be passed over time and again for judicial appointments?
I have been pwned because my
My hats off to Anybody who can find a way to score a +5 Funny off of this article.
* OSDN-owned Slashdot thinks its niche opinion represents the majority of the world. This is a result of people visiting every day and buying into the groupthink. Nobody outside of Slashdot knows or cares about "Linux," "RIAA", "M$," or anything else Slashdotters think is such a huge issue in today's society. Go to a mall or coffee shop sometime and see what people actually talk about.
* Speaking of OSDN--it's a Linux company...that owns a "tech news" site...that posts news stories negative toward competitors like Microsoft. If a Windows company or even Microsoft itself owned a "tech news" site and posted anti-Linux articles all the time, everyone would be up in arms. But with OSDN, it's a-okay.
* Slashbots think people don't like the music coming out these days, which is the cause of the piracy. Never mind that if people didn't like the music they wouldn't be pirating it, most Slashbots--again, this goes back to the niche opinion thing--don't realize that most people these days love the music coming out and want to hear all of it. Probing around, you discover that Slashdot is made up of nerds and fogies who listen to things like The Who and Blind Guardian and techno--not what mainstream society enjoys.
* Any company ending in "AA" is evil. Especially if it doesn't want you distributing its works without paying for it. Somehow, this mindset is supposed to make sense.
* The inevitable result of all this is a world in which nothing can be profitable because people simply pirate free copies. Is that really what Slashbots want? OSS and free-ness in general reminds me of the hippie era of the 60s--idealistic socialism that only exists because of the surrounding capitalism around it that provides the environment for it to exist. We all know what happened to that idea.
* Slashdot editors are abusive. We all remember The Post. It's amusing the editors never mention the issue. The worst editor is michael, who will mod you down, insult you for your post count, and post unprofessional color commentary along with the article. This is the same bizarre person who cybersquatted Censorware for years--even as Slashdot posted articles negative toward cybersquatting! Michael played it off like he was some sort of stalking victim, which made it all the more bizarre.
* The moderation system is broken. If you mod someone as "Overrated," you can't be metamodded. People abuse this all the time to gang up and knock you down into oblivion.
* Somehow, user-ran executables are always a "New Microsoft Hole" (actual article headline). Meanwhile, LinuxSecurity [linuxsecurity.com] posts weekly security advisories for all the Linux distributions. You never, ever, EVER see any of these mentioned on Slashdot--bizarre things like arbitrary code execution via MPlayer.
* Microsoft is supposed to be some sort of non-innovative rip-off artist. Meanwhile, the same people posting those comments do it through KDE with taskbars, sidepanels, start menus, similar print dialogs, and an integrated web/filesystem browser. Slashdotters--ripping people off then criticizing those who came up with the ideas in the first place.
* Linux is "ready for the desktop." This is the yearly uttering since 1998. Never mind that there is STILL no binary installation/uninstallation API for desktops, you can't come home with a printer and a CD and stick it in to get an Autoplay menu that lets you set up the driver. Somehow, Linux is just magically supposed to be ready--that is, if someone else sets it up for you and you never change or add your hardware or software and doing nothing else but check e-mail and browse the web. Conveniently, this includes grandmas, so people can post their grandma-using-Linux stories as "proof."
* Slashdot professes to be some sort of golden defender of consumer copyright law. Few people remember that in an IRC chat, Hemos said that what DailySlash is doing was "illegal" and that they should stop.
* Corporate-owned, subscription fees, banner ads, reposts, and complete fa
Which Star Trek characters (any series) do you think would be Free Software/OSS advocates?
Here's my list:
Jean Luc Picard
Q
Data
Feel free to add your own!
I think ObviousGuy is one of the foremost posters when it comes to modern karma whoring. His thoughts are, of course, more evolutionary than revolutionary and closer to the mainstream concepts of stating the obvious than many of us are aware. His ideas have little impact on the way many of us think about, well, anything.
However, his ideas are only effective within the pages of slashdot. He could actually enact through extramural activity many of the concepts and principles that he believes in if he had an actual opinion.
Which begs the question, why would an obviously talented karma whore be passed over time and again for moderation points?
i got the magic stick
Dear FSF,
You would never elect any of my professors,
because they are all very Microsoft-centric.
That is of course with the exception of Prof.
Loonix!
-Letter
They want their mindnumbingly boring story back.
for the state7 of told r3porters,
This can only serve to strengthen the GPL, particularly as version 3 nears completion, with stronger protections of freedom. All of our hard work is for nothing if Microsoft can steal our code with impugnity.
---
Find out more about the impending downfall o
Perhaps. But remember that he was on the losing side of the Supreme Court case against the Copyright Term Extension Act.
It certainly can't hurt to get all the assistance we can, so I'm pleased that he's been elected to the FSF Board, but let's not kid ourselves: we're very likely to lose the intellectual property fight -- there are far too many large corporations that are in favor of draconian and one-sided (favorable to them) intellectual property laws, and everyone that matters, including the Supreme Court, favors the large corporations.
Interestingly enough, those very laws are exactly what will keep Microsoft in their monopoly position.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Man the barricades for your right to swipe The Simpsons! According to Stanford law professor and media darling Lawrence Lessig, a "movement must begin in the streets" to fight a corrupt Congress, overconcentrated media and an overpriced legal system conspiring to develop "a 'get permission to cut and paste' world that is a creator's nightmare."
That's the gist of Lessig's inflammatory new screed, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity ({(C1)}Penguin Press{(T1)}, $25; free online starting Mar. 25). A more honest title? Freeloader Culture: A Manifesto for Stealing Intellectual Property.
"There has never been a time in our history when more of our 'culture' was as 'owned' as it is now," Lessig huffs. Huh? In the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s a handful of companies exerted ironclad control over the movie, radio and record businesses; Xeroxes and tape recorders were nonexistent. Though "cut and paste" was limited to scrapbooks, creators of all stripes somehow managed to flourish.
Contrary to Lessig's rants, today's technology has made creators freer than ever to devise and distribute original works. But technology has also given consumers powerful weapons of mass reproduction with strong potential for abuse. The intellectual property issue of our time is how to balance the rights of creators and consumers.
Don't look to Lessig for that balance. First he reasonably extols "'Walt Disney creativity'--a form of expression and genius that builds upon the culture around us and makes it something different." But then, in a rhetorical bait-and-switch, he spends most of the book making the case that a free pass should be given to the specific kind of "creativity" that directly reuses existing work, up to and including wholesale sampling and so-called sharing.
That's nuts. Disney reworked public-domain material like "Snow White" gratis, but paid to use copyrighted works like Peter Pan. In a footnote, Lessig observes that "Disney paid royalties to use the music for five songs" in his first sound short. Like most responsible creators, Disney understood the crux of copyright: The owner of a work has the exclusive right to authorize how it may be used. Adapt someone's material, and you generally have to ask permission; you may even have to pay.
Yet often you don't, which is where Lessig's argument dissolves. "Fair use" exceptions in existing copyright law--like the ones that let me quote Lessig here--are so expansive that just about the only thing cut-and-pasters clearly can't do legally with a copyrighted work is directly copy a sizable portion of it. Even then, there are many exemptions for classroom, library, archive and personal use. And the Web lets you legally link to copyrighted material.
That's not nearly enough for Lessig, who once proposed a laughable ten-year maximum term for software copyrights and later suffered a 7-to-2 Supreme Court whupping over his claim that the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act was unconstitutional. The book proposes a slew of sweeping copyright law changes that would consistently screw creators, reward infringers and put the U.S. at odds with international law. Some of Lessig's proposals might well help the big media he claims to detest by offering them the chance to poach material they once would have had to pay for. And he endorses a bizarre, unworkable system of regulating file-sharing in which owners would be paid out of the proceeds from unspecified taxes, "to the extent that harm could be shown"--a sort of federal insurance pool for stolen tunes.
At a time when intellectual property provides America's greatest worldwide successes, overturning established international copyright principles to legalize infringers is like abolishing real estate law to help out squatters. Let's make it clear: The artists who would benefit most from Lessig's legal meddling are rip-off artists.
Lessig's latest book, Free Culture, is available online for free (both as in speech and as in beer). It was reviewed on Slashdot two weeks ago. I haven't read it yet, but I've read one of his earlier books, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, and thought it was excellent.
I think Lawrence Lessig is a marginal person. Someone who is found to be biased against Microsoft in the court can not convince people that what he is saying is the truth. He offers non-commercial license on his site creative commons, but he discourages people from using that license, instead offers the FSF licenses which doesn't have any license that covers non-commercial use. That's very dishonest and assumes that the programmers are nothing but code monkeys producing code. Our code is also creative art and we should have the right to choose our license. This idea that everybody has to release his source under GPL or something complaint is getting to my nerves. Lawrence Lessig is making money out of his writings thus he doesn't see a problem in restricting the use of his work, but we programmers has to release our source code under FSF licenses. That's bullshit.
...will be in the courts. We see it with Linux and SCO, and that won't be the last major court battle over free software. Free software (and open source, for those that worry about that distinction) has proven that it's up to snuff technically. And intelligent people can disagree over ease-of-use compared to commercial products.
But the one area where proprietary software really has had free software outclassed is in legal muscle. Of course, some companies (Novell, IBM, HP for a few) have supported free software because they stand to benefit from it. But free software needs as many sharp legal experts as it can get--that will support free software for the sake of free software. It's nice to see that this is happening.
He is totally a "bear", and you can be his "cub"!
...do they like lawyers or not? ;o)
In a way Lessig is a sellout to the big media industries. They've exploited him time and time again to get people to hold off on outright copyright rebellion. Every time we've had it up to here with the likes of the RIAA and SCO, Lessing would come out and scream from the rooftoops that abolition of copyright is too radical, and those who see copyrights for the evil that they are get labeled as extremists.
Sadly, Lessig is the extremist, and even nurotic. If a mugger wanted to beat an ole lady with a baseball bat 10 times, and I wanted to force it so that she would be beat 0 times - Lessing would come in and say we were both extremists and suggest we beat her 5 times. He has absolutely no non relative morality.
...a beowulf cluster of self-fulfilling /. posts.
From: http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/lawyers.html
A man went to a brain store to get some brain for dinner. He sees a sign remarking on the quality of proffesional brain offerred at this particular brain store. So he asks the butcher:
"How much for Engineer brain?"
"3 dollars an ounce."
"How much for Computer Scientist brain?"
"4 dollars an ounce."
"How much for lawyer brain?"
"100 dollars an ounce."
"Why is lawyer brain so much more?"
"Do you know how many lawyers you need to kill to get one ounce of brain?"
If you want more info about Lessig losing that big copyright case, you can read his account of it. (very interesting, it half reads like an apology.)
Here, in Lessigs style, is an anecdote (from the 80's) : A Microsoft sales rep messed up a 1.5million dollar deal - so the rep is called in to Gates' office and he says to Gates' "I guess I'm fired, yeh?", Gate's replies: "What? you just learned a big lesson and we footed a 1.5million dollar bill for that lesson - there's no way I'm gonna fire and have some other company gain that experience you just gained."
Lessig is a good smart guy, and FSF/GNU have been doing the impossible for 20+ years now. Lessig lost a failed a big test, there'll be other tests, and he'll try again because he cares about the subject matter.
(yes, this is my second time replying to the parent, the first reply was knee-jerk. This post is hopefully more considered - or at the least, it's longer.)
(bleh, this post needs more thinking, but I should go do something else instead.)
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
I think Lessig is one of the foremost thinkers when it comes to modern intellectual property law. His thoughts are, of course, more evolutionary than revolutionary and closer to the mainstream concepts of IP rights and responsibilities than many of us are aware. His ideas have great impact on the way many of us think about IP law.
Nope, you are wrong. Lessig is an intellectual coward at best. 150 years ago Lessig would have been called a cooperationalist - you know, one of those morally shallow enlightened individuals who wanted the free states to compromize with the slave states.
Well the same is true today with Lessig and copyrights. He pays absolutely no tribute to the thought that the "right" to restrict what other people copy is actually just a way of violating them. Yes his position sounds educated, yes it sounds reasonable, but so was it 150 years ago - then as now all his values of right and wrong are relative.
Copyrights are wrong, they ruin culture, and manipulate peoples lives. As copyright monopolies die the death they deserve to die, and society moves into the information age - I think history will jude him as an intellectual coward just like it did the cooperationalists.
Over the years Lessig has always been the goto guy for comments putting the FSF actions and announcements in a digestible context. Now that he is officially part of the organization he won't be able to provide an objective opinion. Is that a gain or a loss?
GPL - Free as in 'Not'
I'm wondering what this adds to the FSF. Sure, Larry's a good fit, but I don't see that he's better value to the FSF on their board than he is off their board acting as a third party commentator. The FSF already has a capable lawyer on the board. If it was the availability of an additional opinion they needed, they could have just asked as necessary.
Of course Larry's probably not a good fit to the EFF board, for exactly the same reason as he would be a valuable addition to that board.
who gives a shit?
Because my article is written for, and widely read by music downloaders, I think this section may be the first introduction most p2p users get to the notion that there is a legitimate reason to consider the elimination of copyright: the reason being that the ability to faithfully and cheaply copy digital information yields more benefit to society than the benefit that results from allowing the authors of digital information a monopoly to their work.
While copyright law is a cornerstone to Open Source licensing - without copyrights, licenses would be unenforceable - I think it's pretty clear especially from Richard Stallman's earlier writing that his objective is the elimination of copyright.
Consider that there are far more people who listen to music than who program, or even use computers. If they were all made to understand the benefit to society of cheap, faithful digital copying, maybe we could eliminate, or at least substantially reform copyright.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
he's already on the EFF's board.
We don't care about your contradictory essays.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
So, um... yeah; that would be "not enough evidence" for me. Can you cite a specific quote by Lessig in support of limiting copyright holders' rights over how they license their works? I think you'll have a pretty hard time...
The parent to this post is not a troll. Lessig knows all the harm of copyrights first hand but still wants to appease the media industries. I think he deserves to be hammered on it and I did. If people don't want to hear it, it's not my fault!
Um... whats the sound of the right hand beating the uh...
Nevermind... (-1 Redundant)
the FSF's ongoing EFFORTS to neutralize legal threats to software freedom.
When I see some SUCCESS, I'll applaud.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Does anyone know what the origin is of the topic-image. I think it looks like dick with a hand grabbing around it. WHO designed it. is sick (and funny)
fwiw, you might check out the streaming archive that I've been putting together...
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda