Larry, who was my original mentor back at law school, says he is leaving copyright, cyber-law and related fields.  Instead — his considerable energies are directed to “corruption” of the political process.  He mentioned this to me in Bonn earlier this year but I didn’t quite realise it was happening.
I can’t help feeling that its like that part in the Lord of the Rings when the elves start leaving middle-earth…
I’m not a privacy scholar guru or anything, nor do I know much more about social networking sites than from monkeying around on my high school’s facebook network now and then. That’s stuff that only danah boyd understands.
But these parental comments, on a random forum, struck me as scary!
excerpt:
I do not believe teenagers “need” privacy-not when it comes to the internet.I track everything my kids do online. I search their bedrooms too. I’m the parent-I’m not their friend. I’d have a stern talking to him asap. I wouldn’t care if he got pissed-if he got mouthy about it, I’d pull his computer privileges and not let him go anywhere except to school and back.
He should consider that lucky…as a mother of a teenage daughter, if it were MY daughter who was his ex gf, he’d have more problems than losing internet rights & visiting his buddies. He’d be scared to leave your side.
The profile of Paul McCartney in last week’s New Yorker is a great read.
What I’m always most amazed about the Beatles is the way they worked. They just wrote songs like that, did a few albums a year, without fuss. Just kind of sat around, thought of a tune, and did it. Sometimes various versions, and just picked the best one.
That’s the way to create if you can do it. Kafka used to write whole stories in a single sitting. Richard Posner writes opinions in one sitting.
You just can’t be too fussy about the details or getting things perfect, as the Beatles, at least at first, weren’t.
Yochai Benkler, here pictured in Los Angeles, is moving to Harvard Law School. Yochai’s work on commons production mechanisms is it.
Great news for Harvard, of course — for years, despite the Berkman center, the school has had only a few high tech, telecom, or IP professors. Terry Fisher, and sometimes Jonathan Zittrain drops by from England.
Tough for Yale but they’ll get over it.
My real big question is whether Yochai’s going to keep that gorgeous apartment he has here in NYC
I’m moving and while I’ll probably buy, I went looking at rentals today.
Check this out. On Bleeker. An empty apartment, with a bad smell. Fourth floor walkup. Bad, fake plastic-wood floors. Collapsed bathroom ceiling. One bedroom.
Best of all, flies everywhere.
Asking Price: $5500 / month
I have a piece supposedly forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review Forum — but supposedly is the operative word.
So in the meantime I’m going to paste the piece below. It is a commentary on a paper by Jonathan Zittrain, called “The Generative Internet.”
In Germany, I was at special conference on commons theory for young scholars.
Despite my relative lack of years, I was actually not one of the young scholars. Instead a co-host with Larry Lessig; our job was to give feedback on papers on commons theory.
Commons theory, while not really new, is surely one of the most interesting areas of research, period. What makes a commons work? When do they fail? What are the merits of property systems?
Some great presentations on such questions from Brett Frischmann (from who I borrow alot from; he is really, really sharp), Stefan Bechtold, a promising young German theorist who organized the conference, plus his co-authors,, James Grimmelman, interested in moderation, Filomena Chirico, who spoke on Net Neutrality in Europe, Guy Pessach, on cultural preservation, David Schorr, Rosa Castro, Clara Sattler, and many commentators.
Larry is working on new and interesting things which he may not want divulged; in addition to being a genius, his presentation abilities are so unusual in academia (if not to say journalism and politics) and remain unequaled among academics I’ve seen.
Spoke at the New Yorker conference in the Gehry building on 18th st. in NYC. Great views of the Hudson river, but on the whole the building on the inside is nowhere near as quirky as on the outside. Somehow I thought there’d be no right angles or something.
The conference was great fun and very fancy. Much fancier than academic, industry, or DC policy events. It was sort of a glamor conference — the New Yorker even hired what in industry we used to call booth bunnies.
Jeff Toobin interviewed me for the conference, here’s the video.
The truth is with a great interviewer you can sound way better than you really are. I’d like to do all my presentations as interviews, or as a team, actually. Ideally like the Marx brothers.
Doing long solo presentations on academic topics can be tough or boring unless you are larry lessig.
I am starting work on a new Slate series called “Lawbreaking in America,” with Dahlia Lithwick as editor.
Chicken meets Blue Bear