bricoleur

Commons Created

The Creative Commons released its Licensing Project and Founder's Copyright today! So, go ahead, create like it's 1790.

Update:Dave Winer is already building support for the licenses into his web logging tool and the RDF spec.

The FCC has just finished accepting the first round of Broadcast Flag comments (read the
read the
Notice of Proposed Rulemaking). The comments are available at the FCC site and others are available from the author's web sites. Those worth a read include:

LawMeme

Consumer Electronics Association

TiVo

Philips

MPAA

Director's Guild of America

DirecTV

Disney/ABC

If you find any other noteworthy submissions, please drop me a note. Reply comments are due on January 17, 2003.

See also Consensus at Lawyerpoint the EFF's blog on the subject.

Rating Systems

Glenn Fleishman (of GlennLog) posts an interesting summary of his discussion with Howard Rheingold about Intentional or Implicit Rating. This is something near and dear to my heart as well, though I dream of the type of rating by action, I think that once we have the AI required to get there (and correctly interpret my actions) we may already have the AI required to correctly guess my actions and figure out ratings from my previous (and unrelated) information dump to the AI. Of course another response is that there is a third way (what GrepMoodMusic uses) that takes intentional ratings and then uses knowledge about those ratings to make a few of them go a long way.

What if?

Jason Schultz, a fellow tech/law geek, is doing some great work (to follow up his Supreme Court amicus brief in Eldred v. Ashcroft) on the potential result of invalidating the 1976 Copyright Act's extension of copyright. [from Lessig Blog].

Cert Granted re: Model Building Codes

Southern Building Code v. Veeck will get supreme court review. It is an interesting decision and Lawmeme's comments are also worth a read.[from LawMeme].

Interview with Brewster Kahle

Interview with Brewster Kahle [from Slashdot].

Star Wars Episode IV

From windows, open Start|Run and type telnet blinkenlights.nl to see Star Wars Episode IV -- as you've never seen it before! [from Abort, Retry, Fail?].

More on "Les Bricoleurs"

Got a compliment today from the inimitable Denise Howell of Bag and Baggage. This made my day because I respect Denise tons and because she included the following new tidbit regarding "Les Bricoleurs:"

In essence, bricolage is what tinkers do -- collecting odd bits of stuff they think may be potentially useful, then using whatever bits seem to work in the context of some later repair job. Simple. And yet profound. Because the bits the bricoleur ends up using were not designed for the use they end up being put to. Figuring out which bits to collect and how to apply them to some task at hand requires a completely different kind of thinking than the procedural algorithmic thought processes business has become so dependent upon. While the Internet may have convinced some businesses to think "out of the box," most are still not even sure what box they’re in, much less which way to turn for emergency egress. If some unprincipled individual were to yell "fire!" right about now, the entire edifice of global commerce might suddenly collapse.

From Introduction to Gonzo Marketing, by Christopher Locke (also of Cluetrain fame).