So my blog turns seven today. On August 20, 2002, while hiding north of San Francisco working on the Eldred appeal, I penned my first (wildly and embarrassingly defensive) missive to Dave. Some 1753 entries later, I’m letting the blog rest. This will be the last post in this frame. Who knows what the future will bring, but in the near term, it won’t bring more in lessig.org/blog.

The reasons are many.

First, as I peer over the abyss of child number 3 (expected in a couple weeks), I can’t begin to imagine how I would be able to allocate the time to give this space the attention it needs. I’ve already fretted about my failure to give this community the time it deserves in REMIX. Things will only get worse.

Second, even if I could, I’m entering a stage of my work when the ratio of speaking to reading/listening/thinking is changing significantly. I’ve just taken up my role as director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. As announced, this means the launch of a 5 year research project on institutional corruption. While I expect that project will have a critical cyber-presence, I don’t want its life to be framed by this blog. The mission, the understanding, the community is different.

Third, even if I could, and even if the work I was doing meant I should, there’s an increasingly technical burden to maintaining a blog that I don’t have the cycles to support. Some very good friends — Theo Armour and M. David Peterson — have been volunteering time to do the mechanics of site maintenance. That has gotten overwhelming. Theo estimates that 1/3 of the 30,000 comments that were posted to the blog over these 7 years were fraudsters. He’s been working endlessly to remove them. At one point late last year, Google kicked me off their index because too many illegal casino sites were linking from the bowels of my server. I know some will respond with the equivalent of “you should have put bars on your windows and double bolted locks on your front door.” Maybe. Or maybe had legislatures devoted 1/10th the energy devoted to the copyright wars to addressing this muck, it might be easier for free speech to be free.

This isn’t an announcement of my disappearance. I’m still trying to understand twitter. My channel at blip.tv will remain. As will the podcast, updated as I speak. I will continue to guest blog at Huffington Post. And as Change-Congress.org enters a new stage, I hope to be doing more there. But this community, this space, this board will now rest.

Thank you to the endless list of people who have helped make this place as it is, or was. Theo and M. David especially. Marc Perkel for his free hosting at ctyme.com for so many years. And thank you especially to the inhabitants of this space, especially the fantastic commentators and loyal backbenchers (Three Blind Mice, you have to reveal yourself now and let me buy you a beer). I have enjoyed this wildly more than I have not (again, I whine in REMIX about the not). And I have been very proud to be responsible for certain bits of content — especially the guest blogging by the interesting and famous (Howard Dean was a favorite, and I will always be proud that I got Judge Posner to experiment with blogging, leading to his wonderful blog with Gary Becker).

Comments on this post will remain open for a week. And then comments on all posts will be locked.

Thank you to everyone, again.

Bibliography

• [berkman] Mapping the global commons, Joho the blog, July 14th, 2009.

Most exciting for those in the CC-community is the following quote from Amazon-blog Chordstrike (the album peaked at #8 on Amazon’s Classic R&B download chart):

Assembled by a crew of some premier sidemen, this fluid set of thumping soul is the sort of album that as fun to listen to as it seems like it was to make. With one eye pointed towards the past and the other one winking, they show love for not only the funky greats of the past 30 years, but affection for kitsch, too. Vosotros takes their motto, “music for you-all,” seriously. They’ve made the album available as a free download for a limited time and licensed it under Creative Commons encourage sharing. Enjoy it, remix it, and tell your friends.

Download the album for free or order it from vosotros’ online store.

To filter by CC search, go to Google’s advanced Image Search page and select the options you’d like in the “Usage rights” section. Your results will be restricted to images marked with CC licenses or other compatibly licensed photos. Differently from Yahoo!, Google searches the whole web, not only Flickr.

Remember, Google can only provide search results that its algorithms find tagged with the license you specify; it is your obligation to verify the license of the image you’re using and make sure you’re conforming to its guidelines.

This is a huge step forward for the future of image search on the web, so congratulations to the Google team on another great CC implementation!

It was a whirlwind of a time, and it was clear that everyone was excited about the pace of development and the promise of open translation for building cultural bridges, facilitating the free exchange of ideas, and empowering those who are not able to participate in the current linguistically and technologically dominant paradigms. Look for additional information on host Aspiration Tech’s site, and check out the new manual on open translation tools which was generated by a book sprint immediately following the conference.

If this meeting was any indication, we suspect that the benefits of permitting translations (through the application of an appropriate CC license, for example) will quickly be matched with both software and communities poised to leverage those permissions. Can we imagine a world where the language of origin serves to authenticate communications rather than hampering them?

I think it can be improved and these are my suggestions.

• Website license: the administrator can choose a general license for the whole website, in “Settings > Writing” page. The plugin adds an explicative xhtml text template in the footer, specifying that this license is the default license that can be different for each post, if noted: “Except where otherwise <a href=”http://[for example, a credits page]“>noted</a>, content on this site is licensed under a [full name of the license]”; the user can modify this template (for example “<p>© 2007 by Lorenzo De Tomasi. Except where otherwise <a href=”http://[for example, a credits page]“>noted</a>, text only content on this site is licensed under a [full_name_of_the_license] <br />[license_button]</p>”;
• User preferred license: each registered WordPress user, in his profile page, can specify its preferred license, that overwirtes the blog license and can be overwrited by the post license.
• Post/page license: the post/page author can choose a specific license for a specific post/page. When you install the plugin, it automatically adds in each “Write post” and “Write page”page a box where you can choose the specific license for the single post, answering to the three simple questions you can find in wp-license options;
• the specific text before the license button can be added and modified in each post, for example “All images in this post are property of Matteo Bedendo. Text only content of this post is licensed under a [full name of the license]”;
• add license property in TheLoop, for displaying the license for each post in archives, category pages etc.

One interesting component of Cadyou’s content is its moderation policy:

Unlike many websites which let user upload their own content, cadyou is moderated ensuring that each file made available reaches quality standards, is tagged well and has great thumbnails so it is easy to find what you need.

Sign up today for unlimited free downloads!

Finding a great image online elicits a little thrill, but it can be tricky – if you’re looking for a pic to pop into a presentation or illustrate a Web page, you need to know if you’re allowed to use that photo, and how you can use it. Today, Yahoo! Image Search is launching a Creative Commons license filter that allows you to simply and quickly find images that are available for reuse.

When you use Yahoo! Image Search, you’ll now see a checkbox for Creative Commons allowing you to filter for images from Flickr that can be used commercially or that can be modified (remixed, tweaked, or built upon) with restrictions set by the image’s creator.

Congrats to the Yahoo! team for extending CC even further into their platform!

Forgive me, but a picture (screen shot) is worth a thousand words (searches):

This migration would be a huge boost for the free culture movement, and for Wikipedia and Creative Commons — until the migration happens there is an unnecessary licensing barrier between the most important free culture project (Wikipedia of course, currently under the Free Documentation License, intended for software documentation) and most other free culture projects and individual creators, which use the aforementioned CC BY-SA license.

To qualify to vote, one must have made 25 edits to a Wikimedia site prior to March 15. Make sure you’re logged in to the project on which you qualify, and you should see a site notice at the top of each page that looks like the image below (red outline added around notice).

Click on “vote now” and you’ll be taken to the voting site. [Update: If you see a different site notice, it's because other important notices about the Wikimania conference are rotating with the vote notice. In that case you can go directly to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:SecurePoll/vote/1. For other Wikimedia sites, change en.wikipedia to the domain of the site in question.]

For background on the migration process, see Wikimedia’s licensing update article and the following series of posts on the Creative Commons blog:

• On being a creative commoner
• Wikipedia and attribution
• Wikipedia licensing Q&A posted
• Wikipedia/CC news: FSF releases FDL 1.3
• Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses released
• DRAFT Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses
• Approved for Free Cultural Works
• Wikipedia and Creative Commons next steps
• Progress on license interoperability with Wikipedia

Here’s a great “propaganda poster”, original created by Brianna Laugher (cited a number of times on this blog), licensed under CC BY. See her post, Vote YES for licensing sanity!

Indeed, please go vote yes to unify the free culture movement!