UPDATE: Mitch Kapor won’t be able to make it to next Tuesday’s Giants of Cyberliberties talk at USC. Mitch had some minor surgery and his recovery — though going well — is taking longer than expected, and he’s been advised against travel. He’s given me a rain check, so expect him to come back next semester for my undergrad course. We’ll still have two dynamite speakers, of course: John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore. See you next Tuesday!
Next Tuesday, November 14, I’m presenting a rare chance to hear technology legends Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore and John Perry Barlow speak at a free event at the University of Southern California.

All three helped found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but that’s just for starters.

Mitch Kapor: Architecture is politics
Mitch Kapor also founded Lotus and created the ground-breaking spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3. He pioneered the “peering” that has become the norm for Internet service providers, and has gone on to lead social investing movements, as well as chairing the Open Source Applications Foundation and being a key player in the Mozilla Foundation.

John Gilmore: The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it
John Gilmore was employee number five at Sun Microsystems and was key
to the development of Solaris and the SPARC chip. He went on to
cofound the USENET alt. hierarchy, The Little Garden, an early
regional ISP, and Cygnus Support, the first big free software business
(now Red Hat). He continues to initiate and/or fund ground-breaking
free software projects like GNU Radio, BitTorrent, Gnash and
FreeS/WAN. He’s an activist for individual rights, including
challenging secret laws and identification demands, starting the
Identity Project, funding and strategizing to end
prohibition of drugs, liberating and aiding the victims of Guantanamo,
and supporting other freedom-oriented charities.

John Perry Barlow: We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
John Perry Barlow has had several careers — beginning as a Republican cattle-rancher who wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead. In the early days of the public Internet, Barlow became famous as a kind of poet-laureate of the Internet, penning such influential documents as the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. Barlow continues to serve as a powerful spokesman for online liberty.

It’s exceedingly rare to have all three of these EFF founders on the same bill. In my five years of association with EFF, I’ve never been in the same room as all three, though I’ve come to know each of them well. These three activist/entrepreneur/artists were absolutely vital to the shape of the Internet as we know it today — they are living legends. Any one of them is worth seeing, but I can hardly contain my excitement at the thought of hearing all three together.

Space is limited, and Gilmore and Mitch have to leave right after the talk, so there won’t be any extended events with all three. Arrive early to stake out your place! I’ll post audio and possibly video after the event.

Where: University of Southern California main campus, Annenberg School of Communications, Room 207 (Los Angeles)
When: Tuesday, November 14, 7PM-9PM.

Link

(Mitch Kapor photo via Smagdali’s Flickr stream; John Gilmore photo by Carl Cheney; John Perry Barlow photo by Bart Nagel)

Registration is now open for my next course at USC, an undergrad class about DRM, EULAs, copyright, technology and control in the 21st century, called “Pwned: Is everyone on this campus a copyright criminal?”

It’s an undergrad course offered as a COMM499 class, but it’s open to any student on campus. I’ll be podcasting it if I can figure out a good recording setup, too. The main class assignment is to work through Wikipedia entries on subjects we cover in the class, in groups, identifying weak areas in the Wikipedia sections and improving them, then defending those improvements in the message-boards for the Wikipedia entries.

The class runs Tuesday afternoons from 3:30-6:20PM. Lots of USC undergrads asked me about attending the grad seminar I’m teaching this semester — here’s your chance. Roll up, roll up!

Every garden has a snake: computers aren’t just tools for empowering their owners. They’re also tools for stripping users of agency, for controlling us individually and en masse.

It starts with “Digital Rights Management” — the anti-copying measures that computers employ to frustrate their owners desires. These technologies literally attack their owners, treating them as menaces to be thwarted through force majeure, deceit, and cunning. Incredibly, DRM gets special protection under the law, a blanket prohibition on breaking DRM or helping others to do so, even if you have the right to access the work the DRM is walling off.

But DRM’s just the tip of the iceberg. Every digital act includes an act of copying, and that means that copyright governs every relationship in the digital realm. Take a conversation to email and it’s not just culture, it’s copyright — every volley is bound by the rules set out to govern the interactions between large publishing entities.

Playing a song for a buddy with your stereo is lawful. Stream that song to your buddy’s PC and you could be facing expulsion and criminal prosecution.

Every interaction on the Web is now larded over with “agreements” — terms of service, acceptable use policies, licenses — that no one reads or negotiates. These non-negotiable terms strip you of your rights the minute you click your mouse. Transactions that would be a traditional purchase in meatspace are complex “license agreements” in cyberspace. As mere licensors, we are as feudal serfs to a lord — ownership is conferred only on those who are lucky enough to be setting the terms. Our real property interests are secondary to their “intellectual property” claims.

When the computer, the network, publishing platforms, and property can all be magicked away with the Intellectual Property wand, we’re all of us pwned, 0wnz0red, punkd. Our tools are turned against us, the law is tipped away from our favor.

Link to course catalog, Link to draft syllabus

Next Tuesday, November 7, EFF senior IP attorney Fred von Lohmann will give a free public talk at USC as part of my ongoing speaker series on digital liberties. Fred is an amazing speaker and a world-famous copyright lawyer. His oral argument in the Ninth Circuit hearing on Grokster inspired a techno remix. Fred previously clerked for a judge and a US senator, and worked under Condi Rice at Stanford. His seminal paper on the DMCA, Unintended Consequences, is one of the most widely cited analyses of the controversial copyright law. Fred is also an ardent music fan, and a tireless proponent of the preservation of fan culture and artist/fan engagement.

His free talk runs from 7-9 PM at the USC Annenberg School on the main campus in room 207. We’ll have the podcast up a day or two later.

Link

Note: THERE IS NO SPEAKER ON OCT 31. Jamie Love was previously erroneously listed as speaking on Hallowe’en, but he won’t be here.

I’m delighted to announce that I’ll be the guest of honor at the science fiction convention Orycon, in Portland, Oregon, November 17-19. I’ve never attended an OryCon before, but its reputation as an excellent event precedes it, and I’m excited to be there with other guests including Vincent DiFate, Ellen Datlow and Michael DeMerritt. The room block is filling up quick, so register ASAP if you want to get the convention rate at the hotel.

While in Portland, I’m also giving a talk on copyright at Portland State University on November 16 at 5PM — it’s free and open to the public.

Link to OryCon, Link to PSU talk

Last year, I spoke at the Roboexotica cocktail robotics conference in Vienna and a bunch of the speakers did a little TV interview for an Austrian indie TV producer. The video’s online now, featuring me, Jake Appelbaum, Francesca Birks, Kal Spelletich and Johannes Grenzfurthner.

Link

(Thanks, Magnus!)

I’m one of the guests of honor at Utopiales, the international science fiction convention being held in Nantes, France on November 2-5. Other guests include Kim Stanley Robinson, Martha Wells, Lucius Sheppard and Norman Spinrad.

Du rouge au vert des petits hommes, Mars en aura vu de toutes les couleurs et demeure à ce jour le sanctuaire de tous les fantasmes en science-fiction. Dernier correspondant, K. S. Robinson aura poussé plus que nul autre avant lui l’identification à la planète rouge. Invité d’honneur du festival, il emmène avec lui cette année une cohorte d’écrivains pour des tables rondes passionnantes. Adeptes des magies noires de l’ère technologique, tels C. Priest, M. Wells ou K. J. Bishop ou rebelles, à l’image de R.C. Wagner ou N. Spinrad, ils rêvent tous de Marx depuis leur enfance. Les Libraires Complices proposent une nouvelle fois, dans le cadre du salon du Livre et de la Bande Dessinée, plus de 25000 ouvrages représentant toutes les maisons d’édition.

Link

The talented folks at DaveFilms have produced a full-cast audiobook adaptation of my award-winning novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. They’re transmitting it in ten parts, as a podcast — part 1 just went live.

This is the second audio adaptation of Down and Out — the podcaster Mark Forman read the book aloud on his podcast in August 2005.

I love the different adaptations of the book — it’s amazing to hear my words read by so many different people, with so many different choices about how to dramatize it. Often, the reading isn’t how I heard it in my own head when I wrote it, which is cool — it’s wild to hear how your own words sound to someone else.

Link to part 1 as MP3, Link to part 1 as streaming Quicktime, Podcast feed