Here are some things that are not just okay, but great, transgressive, brilliant, amazing, and should be entirely legal:

And, here is something that is awful, horrible, embarassing, exploitative, and should be illegal:

Anyone want to step up and explain the difference to me?

Cory Doctorow recently gave a talk at Microsoft, and I think it’s worth reading by just about everyone. First, he says a lot of really sensible things about copyright, and “piracy” and whatnot, but secondly, he does something really amazing. He walks right into the den of the “enemy” or whatever, and he gives it to them straight. He doesn’t chide, he doesn’t hector — he tells them what he earnestly thinks they should do, and it pitches it to them in a way that (a) makes sense, and (b) appeals to their (profit) motives.

This talk is really a good example of how to attempt to persuade someone who might disagree with you. It’s not combative, accusatory, or snide — it’s great. We need more like this.

I like the icon on downhillbattle.org’s “Home Taping is Killing the Music Industry” t-shirt, but I don’t have a machine that can play audio cassettes (or any other kind of cassettes) anymore. So I made this graphic. Here’s the Illustrator 10 file (205k), licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Larry Lessig tells the story of how he lost the Eldred case. What if he’s right? How do you live everyday feeling this way?

This case could have been won. It should have been won. And no matter how hard I try to retell this story to myself, I can’t help believing that my own mistake lost it.