News.Com: Fighting for a new Net copyright deal. Q&A with Lawrence Lessig. We’re ready and eager to build a large grassroots organization of people who demand of Congress that it do something to restore some balance here. This petition is a first step toward going to Washington and saying that there’s a large number of people who want you to consider this. [via Tomalak’s Realm]

Aaron sums it up nicely:

Everything is under copyright. But most of those things aren’t making money, so no one cares about their copyright anymore. The Eldred Act will let you use those things.

Sign the petition. Tell your friends.

[via Aaron Swartz: The Weblog]

OpenLaw.org. Wendy Seltzer.

Parallels between law and open source software. It’s generally public, has a revision history, forks and joins (Supreme Court over differing circuit courts). But process of forming arguments hasn’t been public. So they opened up the process to the public in Eldred vs. Ashcroft. Now opening the DeCSS DVD DMCA case.

Developed an annotation system to comment on or rebut other web pages. Looked like a scrollable iframe with the original site on right, with comments in parallel on left. The courts have accepted their amicus briefs, and they have submitted comments to Copyright Office. Archives of case material, opinions, articles, etc. Important take-away from the session: now I know how to pronounce “amicus.” Or I thought I had just learned, but Larry Rosen behind me pronounced it a different way.

ChillingEffects.org.

Often just the threat of monetary losses in cease-and-desist letters is enough to shut the site down, independent of legal merit. “Shadow of the law.” Example: “you are sharing approximately 0 song files”. Little cost to send C & Ds.

So Chilling Effects archives and publicises them, increasing the cost of sending them by shaming the companies. This also spreads knowledge of the issues.

Update: Donna Wentworth at Harvard Law picked up this entry and provided the link for the C & D example. See her entry for more notes. Thanks, Donna!

Interesting panel discussion.

#1 - Sleepycat CEO
#2 - Lisa ?; lawyer
#3 - Aaron Swartz
#4 - Larry Rosen

Open Source (free because it’s useful, strategic) vs. Free Software (everything should be free) vantage points.

Q. Creative commons vs. source license? Larry Rosen: Courts have confused the issue of software IP by applying both patents and copyright to it. [I’d wondered about this problem; software is kind of in the middle of both and neither is quite right.]

Q. W3C DTD & Schema copyrightable? W3C says yes. But would content using that schema be copyrighted by the W3C? Lisa: Functionality/methods can’t be covered by copyright. –maybe that applies to this case.

OpenOffice person in audience. Teddy Ruxpin case—successful contributory copyright lawsuit. Bootleg cassettes made Ruxpin tell different stories, make different movements.

Q on “Infected” code (could open source contain stealth IP)? Topical; SCO lawsuit.

Aggregation. Aaron: It’s obviously illegal to put scraped feed contents on your page without attribution, obviously legal to write a tool that scrapes to generate feeds. Dave Winer: case of someone who didn’t know RSS was generated auto by Radio. Got mad when it appeared on someone else’s site. After that was explained, problem kind of disappeared.

The RSS topic was starting to get too long and the moderator wanted to switch subjects, before I could get my question in, which was exactly along those lines. He said to defer those questions to Dave Winer’s keynote tomorrow.