Like John Cusack in Better Off Dead when all songs seem to be about what is on your mind (see below), education seems to pop up everywhere I look right now. Well, why fight it? This link is to a host of online resources (HT: Esther Wojcicki). I listen to lectures while exercising. So far [...]

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Costs of education need to come down. Open course materials are growing. Maybe education will indeed undergo a transformation in the next ten years. There are many things that will need to change for true education reform to take place. But better resources matter. Enter Rice University. Its OpenStax College initiative tries to address the [...]

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Andrew Morin and six others have argued for open access to source code behind scientific publishing so that the work can be tested and live up to the promise of the scientific method. At least, I think that is the claim. Ah irony, the piece is in Science and behind, oh yes, a pay wall! [...]

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I am excited to announce that Oxford University Press has published my book, Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources. I owe a huge debt to my Madisonian colleagues for their support along the way. I will post more about the book in the next few weeks, but here are some links and a short [...]

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Yes it is deep thoughts time. The grey lurks between the western hills and the narrowing finger of the south San Francisco Bay. Luckily my friend Norm sent this video to me.
Darth Vader? Good. Bag Pipes? Good. Darth and bagpipes put together with a guy in a kilt and on a unicycle? I leave that [...]

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Cross-posted at Concurring Opinions for a symposium on Julie Cohen’s important new book, Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice (Yale University Press 2012).
Julie Cohen’s book is fantastic. Unfortunately, I am late to join the symposium, but it has been a pleasure playing catch up with [...]

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Blog: A new book by Madisonian Brett Frischmann is on the cusp of release. “Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources” now has its own page at Amazon.com.
Its timing couldn’t be better. Passions over the proposed SOPA (and Protect IP/PIPA, and OPEN, and related) legislation have barely cooled, but debates will certainly continue over Internet [...]

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RIAA:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/opinion/what-wikipedia-wont-tell-you.html
Mike Masnick’s line-by-line reply:  http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120208/01453517694/riaa-totally-out-touch-lashes-out-google-wikipedia-everyone-who-protested-sopapipa.shtml
 
Hat tip to Lauren Gelman.

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There is an interesting blog symposium at Concurring Opinions about Marvin Ammori’s Free Speech Architecture article.  I am participating in the symposium this week, and here is my first post:
Thank you to Marvin for an excellent article to read and discuss, and thank you Concurring Opinions for providing a public forum for our discussion.
In the article, [...]

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Recent readings and reports turn up some provocative examples of what Brett Frischmann, Kathy Strandburg, and I call cultural commons — institutions that enable the structured sharing of knowledge and information rights and resources. The examples illustrate many of the promises and perils of institutions colored by degrees of openness and closure.
From the New York [...]

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Imagine you are a fisherman and haul in a catch with fish that are protected and that would get you in trouble. Quick! Hide it! Deny it! etc., right? Nope. The Times reports that a partnership among fishermen and the Nature Conservancy meant that this fisherman reported the catch so the overall area could thrive. [...]

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From the Shanghai Daily News:
A HONG Kong design student’s tribute to Steve Jobs that generated a buzz online following the death of the co-founder of Apple last week is not original, the teenager said yesterday.
Jonathan Mak, 19, said he was not the first to come up with the design that fits Jobs’ silhouette into the [...]

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At Prawfsblawg, Derek Bambauer has some provocative thoughts about cultural commons that follow up on the “Convening Cultural Commons” workshop that I co-hosted a week ago at NYU, with Brett Frischmann and Kathy Strandburg.
Derek writes:
[T]here was one looming issue that the conferees couldn’t resolve: what, exactly, is a commons?
The short answer is: no one knows. Ostrom’s [...]

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The future of the legal profession is a topic usually reserved for social scientists and legal scholars who focus on the profession itself.  Last Spring, I wrote here that the future of the legal profession is an innovation problem, on a par with the problems that beset the steel industry in the 1960s and 1970s [...]

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The “Constructing Commons in the Cultural Environment” paper and project that I have been working on for some time now with Brett Frischmann (Cardozo) and Kathy Strandburg (NYU) takes a leap forward later this month.  Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom, whose work was our starting point, will be giving a free, public keynote lecture at NYU’s [...]

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I recently returned from our Summer Away program in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  While at the Taos Pueblo, I purchased a pot crafted by an Acoma artist at a small shop.  As I handed the money to the owner, she commented, “This artist has a patent on this design.  No one else can make pots [...]

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But how you free it is another thing… Man accused of hacking millions of papers at MIT (H/T Orin Kerr)

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Free as a verb, not as an adjective.  David Dobbs has an engaging article about publishing and modern science up at Neuron Culture.
It begins:
On Father’s Day three years ago, biologist Jonathan Eisen decided he’d like to republish all his father’s papers. His father, Howard Eisen, a biologist and a researcher at the National Institutes of [...]

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That’s the name of this college kid crafted music blog. Enjoy!

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Eric Johnson has some excerpts and nice commentary about Jonathan Tasini’s lawsuit against the Huffington Post.
For those who haven’t seen it, the argument is that those who have voluntarily submitted published content are now entitled to unjust enrichment damages. This case looks like a loser, and even if it’s not, it should be.

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