Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

cc-eyebeam - [cc-eyebeam] OpenLaw, Chilling Effects, Creative Commons

cc-eyebeam AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Creative Commons-Eyebeam Forum 2003 November 12-19

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Joline_Blais AT umit.maine.edu
  • To: cc-eyebeam AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [cc-eyebeam] OpenLaw, Chilling Effects, Creative Commons
  • Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2003 12:40:37 -0500 (EST)


“Jefferson said that once a generation we
must have another Constitutional Convention
and revise all that isn’t working. Like
taking a car in to get the carburetor
checked. He said you cannot expect a man to
wear a boy’s jacket. It must be revised,
because the Earth belongs to the living. He
was the first that I know who ever said that.
And to each generation is the right to change
every law they wish. Or even the form of
government. You know, bring in the Dalai Lama
if you want! Jefferson didn’t care. Jefferson
was the only pure democrat among the
founders, and he thought the only way his
idea of democracy could be achieved would be
to give the people a chance to change the
laws.”
-from Marc Cooper’s interview of Gore Vidal
(reprinted in Common dreams:
<A Href="http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1113-";
target="_blank">http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1113-</A>
07.htm)


A number of people have been asking about
interventions that might actually achieve a
change in the law. I'd like to mention a few
projects that address this issue and invite
Wendy Seltzer, a driving force behind them to
reflect on this “constitutional crisis”.

<A Href="http://openlaw.org"; target="_blank">http://openlaw.org</A>
<A Href="http://chillingeffects.org,";
target="_blank">http://chillingeffects.org,</A>
<A Href="http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/seltzer.html";
target="_blank">http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/seltzer.html</A>

As some of you know, Wendy Seltzer is an
open-source programmer. She is also an
intellectual property lawyer. Very few people
match both those demographics, and perhaps
for this very reason Seltzer also fits a
third demographic: activist. So we are very
happy to have her ear on this forum. Hi
Wendy!

Seltzer cut her anti-establishment teeth
while studying with cyberlaw guru Lawrence
Lessig at Harvard's Berkman Center for
Internet and Society. She and other Berkman
affiliates have been at work on a
constellation of collaborative efforts to
"open source" the legal process to make it
more accountable to the lay public. The
combined projects represent a strategic
response to Lessig's warning, articulated in
_Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace_, that the
enclosure of cyberspace may happen *de
jure*--from votes on the senate floor--but
*de facto*--from technological "back doors"
in network protocols that can be covertly
manipulated by industry.

In the tradition of Antoni Muntades' File
Room, Seltzer's OpenLaw Web site tries to
breathe the fresh spirit of democratic
innovation from the world of "do it yourself"
computer programming into the musty world of
hidebound lawyers and cloistered judges. The
Openlaw Web site offers visitors a rare
opportunity to flesh out legal arguments with
their own twists or examples. Openlaw doesn't
just archive its amicus curii ("friend of the
court") briefs; it sends them to the Supreme
Court, either as a request to review a case
(as in its petition for certiorari in the
Eldred v. Ashcroft copyright extension
fight), or as expert testimony (as in its
amicus curii brief for Universal v. Ramirdez,
a case that challenged the legality of
posting the DeCSS code in the Gallery of CSS
Descramblers mentioned earlier). The job of
Openlaw's administrators is to turn public
opinion into executable culture--in this
case, executable by the U.S. legal system.

The second star in the Openlaw constellation
is the Chilling Effects Web site. For an
artist like Mark Napier, whose images of
distorted Barbies earned the ire of Mattel's
attorneys, this repository and analysis of
actual cease-and-desist letters helps sort
out the genuine legal threats from the
handwaving of corporate lawyers. A
thermometer on the Web site gauges the
current political climate for the free
circulation of ideas; it serves the same
purpose for intellectual property as the
infamous clock on the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists did for the threat of nuclear war.

And of course, the third component, the
Creative Commons Web site, offers an
assortment of licenses artists can use to
permit more open access to their work than
conventional copyright allows. As mentioned
by earlier participants, the goal of the
Creative Commons is to enable a repository of
artworks made available for fair use
derivatives. Like Chilling Effects, Creative
Commons is aimed more at changing attitudes
than laws.

While we are now trying to exert pressure to
get our culture back, I hope that this is
only a first wave of activism that will help
us get not just our culture, but our land,
our health, our country back. I hope what we
are seeing is a real constitutional crisis of
the kind Jefferson hoped would happen, rather
than the kind of world Ben Franklin feared:
the erosion of the Bill of Rights produced by
the First, and now the second (pending)
Patriot Act.

If this nation is to continue as a democracy,
and Jefferson’s vision is plausible, then
there ought to be ways for us to amend the
laws promulgated by the dead to ensure a
future for the living. Wendy’s work is a
beginning. But there is still a long way to
go. Where do we go from here? And how? Is
this three-prong approach having an effect in
changing public attitudes? And can these
attitudes become powerful enough to change
the laws?




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page