Creative Commons and the Eldred Decision

Lawrence Lessig quantifies how well Creative Commons is doing:

Creative Commons launched the licensing project in December 2002. Within a year, there were more than 1,000,000 link-backs to our licenses (meaning at least a million places on the web where people were linking to our licenses, and presumptively licensing content under those licenses). Within two years, that number was 12,000,000. At the end of our last fundraising campaign, it had grown to about 45,000,000 link-backs to our licenses. That was December, 2005. In the first six months of 2006, that number grew by almost 100,000,000 licenses. In June, we reported about 140,000,000 link-backs to our licenses.

Because I'd like to see the public domain defended against entertainment corporations that want to extend their copyrights forever, I thought the 2003 Supreme Court decision Eldred v. Ashcroft was a terrible milestone for creative work in the U.S. Companies like Disney, after making millions adapting works like Cinderella and Snow White from the public domain, are lobbying to deny that right to future creators.

But as Creative Commons grows, I'm beginning to think we're better off after Eldred because it provided such strong impetus to create a new commons for creative work.

Creative Commons · Politics · Publishing · 2006/10/19 · Comment · Link

Santorum: Protecting the U.S. from Lord Sauron

In a meeting with the editorial board of the Bucks County Courier Times, Sen. Rick Santorum used J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings to explain his support for the Iraq war:

Embattled U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum said America has avoided a second terrorist attack for five years because the "Eye of Mordor" has instead been drawn to Iraq.

Santorum used the analogy from one of his favorite books, J.R.R. Tolkien's 1950s fantasy classic, Lord of the Rings, to put an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq into terms any school kid could easily understand.

"As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else," Santorum said, describing the tool the evil Lord Sauron used in search of the magical ring that would consolidate his power over Middle-earth.

"It's being drawn to Iraq and it's not being drawn to the U.S.," he continued. "You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don't want the Eye to come back here to the United States."

This comment writes its own punchline, but as a teen-aged dungeon master I'm the wrong person to mock Sen. Santorum for dorky analogies. One of these days I'll write on my blog about how the battle of Sadr City was like the Caves of Chaos.

But if we're mapping the Lord of the Rings onto Iraq, the books pitted weak hobbits relying on stealth and guerrilla warfare against a mighty superpower that had a huge army and amazing surveillance capabilities. They defeated Lord Sauron by drawing him into a military conflict as a distraction while the hobbits snuck into Sauron's homeland and destroyed him with the medieval equivalent of a suitcase nuke.

Politics · 2006/10/18 · 16 COMMENTS · Link

Daytona Beach Hospital Makes Room for Bikers

Biketoberfest begins in nine days in Daytona Beach, an event heralded by hundreds of huge motorcycles roaring south down Highway A1A like two-wheeled F-16s. Halifax Medical Center is making an unusual preparation for the event -- they're limiting elective surgeries so they have time to put injured bikers back together:

The decision, he said, is the result of the carnage that came through the emergency room during Bike Week 2006. Bike Week is the busiest time at the Halifax emergency room, the state's fourth busiest.

"During the events, we'll have 135 injured come in; half will have to be admitted and 25 percent in the ICU (intensive care unit)," Lang said. "And these are the most serious kinds (of patient casualties): amputations, spine injuries, head injuries."

Daytona Beach · Florida · 2006/10/10 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

God Hates Blogs, Journals, Spaces and Some Photo Sharing

Bloggers are going to hell one entry at a time, according to Kevin D. Denee of the Restored Church of God's Ambassador Youth magazine:

Should teenagers and others in the Church express themselves to the world through blogs? Because of the obvious dangers; the clear biblical principles that apply; the fact that it gives one a voice; that it is almost always idle words; that teens often do not think before they do; that it is acting out of boredom; and it is filled with appearances of evil -- blogging is simply not to be done in the Church. It should be clear that it is unnecessary and in fact dangerous on many levels.

Let me emphasize that no one -- including adults -- should have a blog or personal website (unless it is for legitimate business purposes).

Photo sharing is acceptable to the Lord in some circumstances:

Some questions naturally arise: "Can I have a photo gallery?" For example, maybe you visited an exotic country and want to share your photos with close friends. This can be done, but certain guidelines apply. Of course, there should never be any inappropriate pictures (again, be careful of the appearance of evil); it should be private and password protected, and only shown to family and closest friends.

Politics · 2006/10/08 · 19 COMMENTS · Link

NoWomenJustMen: The Roster at Most Tech Conferences

I heard from one of the organizers of the Spring Experience, an enterprise Java conference organized by NoFluffJustStuff that I criticized for assembling a 38-speaker roster than doesn't include a single female.

He never responded to my request to run his e-mail in full, but this quote sums it up:

We sought out a qualified speaker who was female. She is on your list. Unfortunately, she is in very high demand (as one would probably expect!) and in the end could not commit due to a scheduling conflict. Even with the conflict, we went the extra mile to accomodate her because she brought something different and refreshing to our target audience. Unfortunately, she just couldn't commit.

We're actively pushing bright girls out of professions like programming by reinforcing the idea that technological fields only appeal to one gender. The brain drain this causes has to be incredibly detrimental to this country's competitiveness, discouraging 51 percent of the population from pursuing these fields even as we rely more heavily on them in our economy.

Politics · Java · 2006/10/07 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

Handle 'Scumbag' with Care

The original meaning of the slang term scumbag was a bit more specific than "despicable person" -- it meant "used condom." The New York Times once put a scumbag in its famous crossword puzzle and angered readers.

Former Rep. Dan Burton called President Clinton a scumbag in 1998, sparking press attention in the word's unsavory origins.

Now that I've told you this, please enjoy the following metaphor from Dennis Byrne's commentary about the Foley scandal in the conservative weekly Human Events Online:

... for Rush [Limbaugh], it appears to be just one more case of defending the castle against another onslaught from the left. In this, he's not doing Republicans and conservatives any favors. It just gives gleeful Democrats an example of Republican "hypocrisy." Of how Republicans keep talking about America losing its moral compass, while they've lost it themselves.

Democrats are making gains with it, because it is becoming increasingly true. Otherwise it wouldn't have taken Republicans so long to admit that they messed up by not smelling the scumbag in their midst.

Jargon · Politics · 2006/10/05 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Proposal: Revise the RSS 2.0 Specification

In the 2.5 years I've been a member of the RSS Advisory Board, three questions have been asked most often by programmers having difficulty interpreting the RSS 2.0 specification:

1. Can an item contain more than one enclosure?
2. What elements are allowed to contain HTML?
3. How do I deal with relative URLs?

I think it's time that the board answered them.

In February, work began on a new, written-from-scratch draft of the specification, with each revision announced and vetted on the RSS-Public mailing list. The main contributors to the draft are four members of the board and one of the lead developers of the Feed Validator: James Holderness, Randy Charles Morin, Sam Ruby, Greg Smith and myself.

The new draft documents the same elements and attributes described in RSS 2.0 (version 2.0.8), the current spec, making no changes to the requirements upon which RSS creators Dan Libby and Dave Winer sparked the incredibly successful RSS boom. No elements have been added or removed.

It does clarify the RSS specification in the three areas mentioned above, based on our interpretation of the current spec and its predecessors:

1. An item cannot contain more than one enclosure. The only RSS element that can be present more than once in an item is category.
2. The only RSS element that can contain HTML is an item's description.
3. Relative URLs are not allowed. When they're encountered in an item's description -- which is not recommended -- the feed's link element should be used as the base URL.

Though we could answer these three questions by editing the current spec, this draft should be easier to interpret because it follows the rules of RFC 2119, a standard for spec writers that dictates exactly what words like "must", "may" and "should" mean when they appear in a technical document.

It also has been through a thorough and open review process that included 11 revisions to the draft and 13 revisions to a companion document still under development, the RSS Profile.

I proposed today that the RSS Advisory Board adopt the draft as version 2.0.9 of the RSS 2.0 specification.

If this proposal is seconded, the seven-day discussion period will be used to fix mistakes, address concerns and make other minor edits to this draft. When the vote begins, I'll report to the board on the changes that were made and publish the final draft at the above URL for consideration.

Comments from the public are encouraged on the RSS-Public mailing list.

Rss · 2006/10/04 · 1 COMMENT · Link

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