RiP!: A Remix Manifesto" is a 2008 open source documentary directed by Brett Gaylor. It was developed collaboratively online at Open Source Cinema, and Gaylor has left it on the Open Source Cinema site and encouraged others to remix it.

The film, running about 80 minutes, is framed primarily around the work of Girl Talk, a remix musician who has become one of several major symbols of the remix/copyright reform movement. Lawrence Lessig chips in as well, giving the framing some intellectual heft, and Cory Doctorow and a handful of others drop in from time to time.

In Chapter 4 of From Coding to Community, I discussed how open source software's struggle with usability can be understood, in part, as a conflict between the procedural tropes of iteration and abstraction. Today, Matt Asay blogged about another important aspect of this struggle: the free software movement's tendency to cling to purity with religious fervor.

There are two really interesting projects going on this week. I'll offer some commentary on each of them once they've concluded, but in the meantime you should keep an eye on the unfolding events.

Economist Debates: Copyright and wrongs

I defended my thesis this week and will be finalizing it very soon, at which point I'll upload it here for public consumption, but I wanted to briefly think aloud about some of the questions that came up during my defense. This is not a fully developed post, but more of a kicking of the tires.

This blog has been pretty much dead since I entered full production on my thesis. Key takeaway? Blogging drops WAY down on the priority list when thesis writing kicks in, and while this space was really helpful for me early on (for testing out ideas, for reviewing the literature, and for just getting some writing done), it's felt like a distraction during recent months. If I'm going to be writing, shouldn't I be writing for my thesis?

I just posted a review of "Hacking: Digital Media and Technological Determinism" over at gnovis.

On Friday afternoon, during my third attempt to locate Steven Weber's book "The Success of Open Source" at Lauinger Library, I scanned the spines of several hundred books, hoping to find it misshelved nearby. Instead, I stumbled across Tim Jordan's "Hacking: Digital Media and Technological Determinism," which has turned out to be the most delightful read I've come across since I began working on my thesis. Read More »

If you're reading this blog, this book is a must read. And at only 140 very-accessible pages, it'll only take an afternoon.

I just published a review of "The Public Domain", by James Boyle over at gnovis.

If you're familiar with the work of Lawrence Lessig, you'll recognize the formula James Boyle follows in his latest book, "The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind". It goes something like this: Read More

Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations" (2008) -- once you've sifted through the largely unfocused pop culture fluff -- is essentially a response to Ronald Coase's 1937 article "The Nature of the Firm," in light of the current technology landscape.

Today's exercise: A brief Lit Review of each of Lawrence Lessig's books.

In Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999), Lessig explores cyberspace "as it moves from a world of relative freedom to a world of relatively perfect control" (p. 23). He describes regulation (online or off) as the combination of constraints due to laws, markets, norms, and architecture (p. 87), but that law is able to regulate both directly and, by influencing the other three constraints, indirectly, and argues that the architecture (the code) is the critical factor in determining the level of regulation of the internet. He acknowledges the significance of open source software as "a check on state power" (p. 100) but warns that, contrary to popular belief, we are entering a period of increasingly restrictive copyright regulation (p. 127). In a curious aside (p. 225), he argues that modular code delivers some of the benefits of open source code, even if it is closed source.

Over at gnovis, I just posted a book review of Johan Soderberg's "Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement, arguably the only full length book to bring NeoMarxist criticism to bear on the open source software movement. I highly recommend