Art Talk presents news, essays, readings, artist surveys, historical information about artist and art subjects, and featured sites of artist on the web. Lot's of links. Informative & educational & motivational. Edited by Chicago area artist Paul Grant (follower of Basho)
A artistic-photolytic of Jean-Michel Basquiat by Paul Grant (follower of Basho)
*** I am going through a Basquiat period right now. I am reading about him in a new book from Yale University Press :: Ambition & Love in Modern American Art by Jonathan Weinberg. Then follwed up with the only Biography I coud find of him byPhoeb Hoban : Basquiat - A quick Killing in Art.
I have never really liked Basquiat's work. I first read about him in Andy Warhol's diaries and had the suspicion that Warhol had a sexual crush on the young black man.
Basquiat was a bi-sexual. His first sexual encounters were gay, and as a teenager he ofter worked as a gay street hustler. Though later in his life he had many famous and infamous relations with woman, including Maddona.
Andy Warhol was a closeted homosexual.
Warhol chose to partner up with Basquiat over Keith Harring among other up and comming artist. Harring who was also in the Warhol circle at the time - but was openly gay.
The two, Warhol and Basquiat did a series of painting together. Warhol started, usually with a corporate logo, and Basquiat would paint on top of Warhol's work. Apparently Basquiat would have to encourage Warhol to add more to the collaboration. The essay in the book talks about how Basquiat was used not only by Warhol but also by the artist Schnabel who was a contemporary and who would make a movie about (and titled) Basquiat. (A movie a I enjoyed).
Basquiat, filmed in 1986
-------------------------------------- The SAMO `tagging' period of Basquiat life
In 1977, when he was 17, Basquiat and his friend Al Diaz started spray-painting graffiti art on slum buildings in lower Manhattan, adding the infamous signature of "SAMO" or "SAMO shit" (i.e., "same ol' shit"). The graphics were pithy messages such as "Plush safe he think; SAMO" and "SAMO is an escape clause". In December 1978, the Village Voice published an article about the writings.[1] The SAMO project ended with the epitaph SAMO IS DEAD written on the walls of SoHo buildings.
SAMO as a neo art form.
SAMO as an end to to mindwash religion, nowhere politics and bogus philosophy.
SAMO as an escape clause.
SAMO as an end to playing art.
SAMO as an end to bogus pseudo intellectual. My mouth, therefore an error. Plush safe.. he think.
SAMO as an alternative 2 playing art with the 'radical chic' sect on Daddy's $ funds. Jean-Michel Basquiat Qoutes:
* "Every single line means something."
* "Since I was seventeen I thought I might be a star. I'd think about all my heroes, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix… I had a romantic feeling about how these people became famous."
* "I don't think about art when I'm working. I try to think about life."
* "Believe it or not, I can actually draw."
* "I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is."
* I wanted to be a star, not a gallery mascot.
+ I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life.
+ I thought I was going to be a bum the rest of my life.
+ I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist, or I'd draw a ram's head, really messy. I'd never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect spiderman.
+ I had some money, I made the best paintings ever. I was completely reclusive, worked a lot, took a lot of drugs. I was awful to people.
Rick Bayless the famous Chicago Chef and expert on Mexican cuisine writes:
Nicolás de Jesús was born and raised in a small Nauha village in central Guerrero named Amayaltepec.
At a young age he learned how to paint on amate bark paper from his father Pablo de Jesús—one of the first artisans in all of Mexico (he started in 1962) to produce the type of work that is now mass-produced and sold at tourist destinations. By the time the well respected art activist Felipe Ehrenberg started to teach Nicolás etching and other printing techniques, the young artist had already adopted the traditional amate composition with many whimsical and detailed characters and a great empty space atop the page to suggest a great distance.
The reoccurring theme in Amayaltepec amates is everyday village life—it’s celebrations and beliefs. After moving to Chicago in the 1980’s, de Jesús additionally started to depict urban life in U.S. barrios in the same manner.
Both of the prints on display at Frontera Grill are prime examples of Nicolás de Jesús’s work. The compositions and perspectives are a direct reference to his father’s self-taught, naive background. Although Nicolás’s work is clearly more refined, one can still recognize his strong popular art roots. As is true in the work of many mestizo (Spanish and indigenous) artists, the notions of everyday life, work and traditions is juxtaposed with a spiritual reality in de Jesús’s work. Secular and sacred go hand in hand to complete life’s big picture. In Campesinos we see a detailed nostalgic scene of work in the fields of a Nauha community, while El Regreso depicts the ardent faith in the annual return of one’s dearly departed souls every November 1st and 2nd.
The extremes of social inequality which he and his family experienced in their native village of Amayaltepec, located in the arid province of Guerrero, Mexico, continue to inform and pervade his work. Nicolas says that he is “an engraver, a defender of the rights of indigenous peoples and anti-clerical.” Using wit and satire, Nicolas is a printmaker and muralist whose career has developed from its beginnings as the son of one of the founders of the Amate School of Mexican folk artists from Guerrero, through a period in Chicago in the 1990’s, to international standing, with exhibitions throughout Mexico, the United States, France, England, Japan and Holland. Drawing on his life experiences living with a Nahua community, Nicolas explains that to create, one must explore one’s internal memories. Those memories, such as the celebrations of his town and how the elders prepared for those ceremonies, resurface in his etchings and paintings.
His career began in 1982 with the painter Felipe Ehrenberg, from whom he learned the techniques of printmaking. Nicolas is best known for his works on amate bark paper, a traditional product of trees local to the San Pablito, Puebla region, pre-dating the arrival of the Spanish in Central America. But Nicolas De Jesus is also a prolific illustrator and muralist, his work adorning books with the text in Nahuatl and which have been translated into English and French.
My choice of web browsing is looking for some participation from their client base for a new T-shirt design announcing the arrival of their programs third addition. People from around the world have submitted more than 3,000 entries. They are an education in `global-image thinking' and can be seen at Flicker here (join the group to view.)
Here is my submission.
Firefox deatails
Mozilla Firefox (abbreviated officially as Fx, but also unofficially as FF) is a web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite, managed by the Mozilla Corporation. Firefox had about 15% of the recorded usage share of Web browsers as of January 2008 making Firefox the second-most popular browser in current use worldwide after Internet Explorer[1]. Firefox has been considered a "rival" to Internet Explorer.[2]
Firefox uses the open-source Gecko layout engine, which implements some current Web standards plus a few features which are intended to anticipate likely additions to the standards.
Firefox includes tabbed browsing, a spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, and a search system that uses Google. Functions can be added through more than 2,000 add-ons created by third party developers;[3] the most popular include NoScript (script blocker), FoxyTunes (controls music players), Adblock Plus (ad blocker), StumbleUpon (website discovery), DownThemAll! (download functions) and Web Developer (web tools).[4]
Firefox runs on various versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and many other Unix-like operating systems. Its current stable release is version 2.0.0.12, released on February 7, 2008.[5] Firefox's source code is free software, released under a tri-license GPL/LGPL/MPL.[6]
Kevin Connolly is a photographer. In this series Connolly attempts to see the world fro fresh eyes - the eyes that are observing him.
Connolly leveraged his perspective on life as a legless guy who gets around on a skateboard into a compelling series of photos of people staring at him.
I always find it interesting to here how other (especially successful) creatives live. Usually it is not glamorous (Warhol and Dali being exceptions). Usually what I find is obsessiveness.
I happened upon a blog entry from a mystery/thriller writer whom I like named Robert Crais. Reading about `artistic discipline' I find inspiring.
My Writing Day 4:57 PM PST, February 9, 2007 I get letters through my website. About a dozen letters every week are from people who want to know what my days are like. The folks asking are usually students or aspiring writers, and I do my best to answer, but I figure they’re always disappointed with the answer. I mean, think about it: What’s your day like? I write. Uh-huh. And what’s that like? It’s like typing. What do you do when you’re not typing? Worry about not typing.
Well, okay, it’s not that bad but you get my drift. Still, people take the time to write, and ask, so I worked up a cut & paste answer that gives a pretty good overview.
My alarm is set for 5AM, but I usually wake between 4 and 4:30, and hit the kill switch before the alarm can wake my wife. I like rising early, being awake and functioning in those dark hours before sunrise when the rest of the world sleeps. It feels as if I’m getting a jump on the day. Bonus time.
First thing I do is head for the gym or run. I like to work out, and pursue it with the same obsession that I pursue writing. I’m at the gym by 5:45AM four days every week, then home, showered, and at my Mac by 7. The gym might be four days per week, but the writing comes every day.
The intensity of my writing day varies along predictable patterns. The first three months or so that I spend on a book are when I outline and make general notes to figure out the story and the characters. My outlining days are low-key and pleasant as the deadline is still usually far away.
I’ll work until late-morning, then take a Tivo break to catch up on the shows I missed the night before (hey, I get up at 4, remember?) Current faves are HEROES (“Save the cheerleader, save the world.” Ya gotta love it.) and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (the best drama on television, imho.) After my Tivo break, it’s back to work.
During the outlining is when I do the bulk of my research. Because I write crime novels, I spend time with police officers, learn how they do their jobs, and visit crime scenes to gain the necessary color to create believable fiction. Most times this is great fun, and it’s always interesting, but sometimes it is not fun at all. I saw a young man who had been shot in the head die in his own driveway, the victim of a drive-by shooting. Sometimes, the research gets too real.
After the outline comes the actual writing of the book, which can be beautiful, but, just as often, painful. When I’m outlining, I work from about 7AM until 3PM. Once I start writing, however, my work hours expand and the daytime Tivo breaks are history. When I finally start writing the book, the fun part of the process is over. Now, I’m all business.
My obsession--my need--is simply to create a complete first-pass manuscript, nothing more than that. I work hard to write it as well as I can during that first pass, but my goal is to get the story down on paper, beginning to end. After that, I rewrite. I rewrite endlessly. I fuss over every word, I obsess about character and dialog. I make my life hell to get my work just the way I want it.
I’ll write from 7AM to about 6PM, but as the deadline approaches, I shift into overdrive. I hate deadlines more than the ebola virus, more than cosmic injustice, even more than taxes. No writing was ever made better by a deadline, but an awful lot of good work has gotten finished because of them.
During those last two or three months as I finish a book, I’ll work fourteen to sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. I lose all track of time and family obligations. If my wife didn’t pay our bills, the power company would turn off our electricity. The only reason I’d know the power was off is that my Mac would stop working. I’d probably just pick up a pad and keep scribbling.
When the book is finished, so am I. I’ve put everything I have into the pages. I collapse, sleep for days, walk around in a stupor, then start the next book.
THE WATCHMAN will be published in just two weeks. I’m already writing next year’s book.
Bio
Robert Crais
Robert was born (1953) and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He grew up in a family of oil refinery workers and five police officers (three uncles and two cousins).
He was trained as a mechanical engineer. He did attend Louisiana State University (being the first person in his family to do so) but left before graduation to pursue his literary career. While working at his craft Robert had several 'day' jobs, including digging ditches, cleaning out dog runs and painting oil derricks. He was also involved in amateur film-making.
In 1976, he moved to Los Angeles, California. Within a year, he sold a science fiction short story called With Crooked Hands. This was his first professional sale...and just the beginning! He found work writing for a variety of television shows, including Hill Street Blues, Cagney and Lacey, Miami Vice, L.A. Law, Quincy, and JAG (under his Elvis Cole pseudonym). His work on Hill Street Blues earned him an Emmy Award nomination.
Sadly, in 1985, Robert's father passed away. His parents had been married for 42 years and his mother had a hard time after his death. Robert stepped in to help out. It was during this time that he came up with his hugely popular Elvis Cole character. He was able to deal with certain themes and issues which he could not in his television work.
In addition to his television work, Robert has written numerous novels and short stories. His work has been translated into eleven different languages and is available around the world. His writing has earned him many awards.
Robert is currently living in the Santa Monica mountains (Los Angeles) with his wife, daughter and three cats. When he is not busy working, he 'plays' as an aerobatic pilot, backpacker and gourmet cook. Elvis would be proud!
THE sole survivor of Sydney's double drain-drowning yesterday said he would "gladly trade places" with his two dead friends.
Graphic arts student Holly Legge, 21, from St Peters, and her friend Dwane Larosa, 25, from Pennant Hills, drowned after being dragged almost a kilometre by floodwaters rushing through the stormwater drain where they had gathered to drink and spray graffiti.
Michal Malinowski, 27, who was with the pair, was swept out to Lurline Bay, where he was rescued. Yesterday Mr Malinowski, the owner of Newtown spray-painting business Five Six Seven King, said he "deeply regretted" the events of Sunday night.s one of the largest suppliers of spray paint to street artists and taggers in Sydney.
Tragedy ... a photo of the victim Dwane Larosa is left on a post near the scene of his death. Picture: Craig Greenhill
Speaking from his family's Pennant Hills home, Mr Malinowski's brother Adam read from a prepared statement.
"As you can imagine, he is in deep shock after the dramatic and tragic experience that took the lives of two of his friends and almost his own," he said. "He deeply regrets the whole event and would gladly turn back the clock and trade places with them if he possibly could.
"Michal feels deeply for the family, friends and loved ones of Holly and Dwane. He cannot understand why he survived and they did not."
Michael Gustav Malinowski, 27, the owner of paint supply shop Five Six Seven on King Street, Newtown, is one of the largest suppliers of spray paint to street artists and taggers in Sydney.Mr Malinowski's shop has remained closed since the accident.
He was interviewed by detectives from Maroubra police late yesterday but no decision has been made on whether he will be charged. Graffiti squad police confirmed yesterday that Mr La Rossa was known to the unit, with past offenses ranging from drugs, goods in custody and assault.
Witnesses at the scene of the double drowning said Mr Malinowski had become distraught and threatened to throw himself back into the water when he realised his two friends had not made it out alive.
Adam Malinowski said his brother was still suffering greatly. Adam , who said he too was close friends with Mr Legge and Mr La Rossa, fought to hold back tears when he said the group were "artists" and not part of the Sydney Cave Clan, a group that explore tunnels. "The graffiti they were doing [inside the drainage outlet] was true art. It was like a mural.
"It just happened that they chose to do it at the wrong place, wrong time. It just happened in an instant. [Michael said] there was a big sound … like thunder. He's probably thinking why was he the only one to survive."
"He is still traumatized, he is still grieving over the loss of his two friends and has had some counseling. It is the first time that someone close to Michael has died, so he is feeling terrible. You just can't imagine how the families are feeling," Adam Malinowski said.
"At the moment, he is under the care of a professional counselor while he comes to terms with his harrowing experience and is not in any condition to talk personally as the shock and trauma have set in deeply."
Sunday's disastrous venture follows encounters with the law by Michael Malinowski that included an unsuccessful attempt by police to close his Newtown paint shop or restrict the types of sprays he could sell.
On April 4, 2006, he was arrested while painting on a wall of the M2 Motorway at Beecroft. He was convicted, fined $400 and ordered to pay $67 court costs.
On December 12, 2006, he was convicted for selling spray paint to a minor, fined $650 and also ordered to pay $67 court costs.
In an interview with The Sun-Herald after his shop opened in 2005, Michael Malinowski said he was determined to educate the area's youth about the do's and don'ts of "street art".
He was responding to concerns that his business would become a one-stop shop for vandals.
But he said: "There will always be a minority who do the wrong thing, who would probably do the wrong thing if the shop was here or not … it's our responsibility to try to educate people to use these products for art and not vandalism."
After his conviction for vandalizing the M2 wall he said: "I pleaded guilty because I did the wrong thing. I don't really want to say any more. I'd prefer it if you didn't write anything. This shop is my livelihood."
The Premier, Morris Iemma, said yesterday he saw no need for Sydney Water to remove maps of tunnels and drains from its website despite the tragedy.
Mr Iemma said Sydney Water was working with police in investigations into the incident but said staying out of drains should be a matter of simple common sense.
"Regardless of where you get the information from, whether you access it from the web, whether you get it from the newspaper or whether you just get it by driving around, these are not places for you to be," Mr Iemma said.
"It is in the territory of personal responsibility.
"Whether it's a drain or a train, graffiti can lead to deadly consequences or serious injury. That doesn't underscore the devastation that the families are feeling and my heart goes out to them."
Friends pay respect
Yesterday afternoon a group of 14 friends, including Mr Larosa's girlfriend Bobbi, returned to Lurline Bay in Sydney's east to pay their respects.
Photos and items of clothing were tied to the cliff face, along with flowers, an Australian flag and a crushed can of Jack Daniels. They also used a black Texta to cover a pillar in messages for Mr Larosa.
"I still can't believe you wore a pink shirt 4 me, XOXO Bobbi", his girlfriend wrote.
A friend of Ms Legge has also written about her online, describing her as "an amazing artist and a beautiful soul".
"She painted the female form beautifully and amazing landscapes," the friend said. "She was an extremely talented person."
Ms Legge, a graphic arts student at TAFE, also had a full-time job and was involved in at least one community project, her friend said.
"She was a member of a group that has personally financed a warehouse for the use of artists such as herself and it has been approved by the council. The warehouse is currently having disabled access put in at the cost of those artists financing it.
As a project to expand my mind, I have taken on the task of trying to understand some of the sayings of the philosopher Heraclitus. Roger Van Oech, who wrote: A whack on the side of the head, also wrote a nice little book called Expect the unexpected, or you won't find it - a creativity tool based on the ancient wisdom of Heraclitus. I had read the book several years ago, and happened upon it during a reorganization of my library.
The book list 30 sayings attributed to Heraclitus, with small interesting chapters on each. When I picked up the book and skimmed through it, noticing what I had underlined, I had the thought - did Heraclitus actually say what Van Oech claimed?
So I began researching the sayings, and seeking alternative translations. Then working with the translations I tried to `grasp' the idea. I decided to write my observations and thoughts down before rereading the Van Oech chapters again. It was amazing to see how different our perceptions of the meaning were. (You will have to read the book to see what he came up with. The following is what I came up with:
expect the unexpected or you won't find it
Finding the original , or as close to the original text, I then began searching the internet for translations for that text. Since the language was early Ionian Greek, I knew that subtleties might have been lost, so I wanted to find as many translations as possible. I came upon these offerings:
If you do not hope, you will not find that which is not hoped for; since it is difficult to discover and impossible to attain.
If it is not expected unexpected one it will not discover, because it (then) cannot be investigated and inaccessible remains.
If someone does not hope on unexpected, he it will not find, because it is then untraceable and inaccessible.
Without the hope, you will not find the unhoped-for one who is untraceable and inaccessible
If er's does not expect, he will not find the unexpected. Because otherwise ist's impenetrably and inaccessible.
(Translation from Latin:) If not hopes, unexpected not invenientis quum to come upon not hold and inaccessum he is.
If you do not hope, you will not find that which is not hoped for; since it is difficult to discover and impossible to attain.
If he won't hope for it, unhoped-for [as he lets it be] he won't discover it - being unexplored and inaccessible.
The definition of hope ="hope;" L. volo, velle "to wish, will, desire.
So reversing this idea, might mean that what you hope for, what you will to happen, what you want to happen -even though it seems inpossible, unattainable, begins a process of transformation from first the idea, to the words that explain the idea, to the subconscious mind working on the idea, to eventually the outcome desired.
This is not an unfavored idea, the movie and the best selling book- The Secret, basically says the same thing. The difference though from other `positive mindset' philosophies is in the `logos' or words. The ideas (wishes) begin to take shape when they are translated from the non physical realm of thought, into the physical words. Writing down these words takes it to another step towards its eventuality. Written down it can be `investigated'. And after achieving what is hoped for there will be the traceable path of the causes and effects that started when the hope was turned into words.
Does it happen every time? I think not (said the miserly little man in my head). As an experiment though, I am going to begin listing desires and wishes each day, for as long as I can keep it up, and see.
One of the keys must be the expectation of fulfillment- rather than the doubtful mind- `oh this will never happen'. This will be my greatest challenge for doubt often seems to control me.
When the phone rings and my new mate answers happily - "Honey that was the gallery, they just sold another piece."
When Presidential candidate Illinois senator Barack Obamas staff arrived at the gallery to check out the space before an upcoming event, they decided that two of the paintings in the gallery had to go. One was actually removed and the other picture was covered with a tarp. They were hopping not to have Mr. Obama associated with theses pictures, because for them, something was inappropriate about them for the occasion. The occasion was of course Obama speaking in an art gallery where artist works hung on the wall to be appreciated and possibly sold.
What Obamas handlers did not understand was that there is a causal force working in the universe. That means fore every cause there is an effect, and that actually (or should we say possibly) there is no such thing as randomness. Mr. Obama was meant to speak at that art gallery, and the pictures were meant to be associated with him. And that is the outcome which occurred. The News on the web picked it up
The web site the Smoking Gun with average daily readership of 74,000 picked up the story. They posted two large images of the pictures in question, and the association began.
Then Matt Drudge of the drudge report picked it up from the Smoking Gun and the story went National. Matt Drudge and his Drudge report are powerful. In their 2006 book The Way To Win, Mark Halperin and John Harris report that:
"Drudge, with his droll Dickensian name, was not the only media or political agent whose actions led to John Kerry's defeat. But his role placed him at the center of the game -- a New Media World Order in which Drudge was the most potent player in the process and a personifications of the dynamic that did Kerry in."[17]
In 2006, TIME Magazine named Drudge one of the 100 most influential people in the world,[18] describing the Drudge Report as:
"A ludicrous combination of gossip, political intrigue and extreme weather reports ... still put together mostly by the guy who started out as a convenience-store clerk."
ABC News concluded that the Drudge Report sets the tone for national political coverage.[19] The article states that:
"Republican operatives keep an open line to Drudge, often using him to attack their opponents."
The New York Times wrote that Republican and Democrat presidential candidates were "working harder than ever to get favorable coverage for their candidates — or unfavorable coverage of competitors — onto the Drudge Report’s home page, knowing that television producers, radio talk show hosts and newspaper reporters view it as a bulletin board for the latest news and gossip.
Poor Obama. By his staff trying to disassociate Obama from the art worked actually sealed the association by bringing national news attention to the censorship. The good news for Jamie Boling's the artist is that it brought him national attention. Look, even months after the incident people are still writing about it. (The incident happened in May 2007.)
The artist response
This picture gives you an idea of the size of the Britney piece.
"I can understand why a politician wouldn't want to be photographed in front of Britney Spears' crotch," says Boling, "but I wish that Obama would have been more fearful of censorship than the possible fallout of an unfortunate photograph. He could have used the whole thing as an opportunity to defend free speech instead of making a move to cover and remove the painting."
One of the pictures, Jamie Boling's 6'x10' Snake Charmer painting, depicts a special moment in Britney Spears' eventful life, was covered up. It has more recently traveled around as part of the "Just Britney" group show of paintings, drawings, and sculpture by 47 artists inspired by Britney Spears.
I am a product of contemporary popular culture. I grew up on Star Wars, Jaws, Easy Rider, posters of Farrah Fawcett, and video games. It was through these early mediated visual experiences that I began to engage fiction and encounter the possibilities of representation. The work that I make captures and catalog the profound and fugitive moments of my cultural experience while it serves as an autobiographical survey of my evolving aesthetic. My work emerges from the study and influence of art-historical models and technical traditions as it confronts contemporary fiction and modern visual forms.
At the heart of my work is the belief that physical materials give an image context through their inherent historical, metaphorical, and linguistic implications. Likewise, images carry their own meaning when filtered through the lens of culture and individual experience. My interests reside in this convergence of material and image.
I went to Madison Wisconsin Sat Nov. 17th. and saw this act performed. It's harder to believe in person. Afterward I was able to meet the twin sisters (the Bazaliy sisters Taisiya and Ruslana)who were both beautiful and friendly.
If you get a chance to see cirque du soleil - you should. It goes well beyond expectation.
What I think was especially interesting about this TED Talk (Inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers : http://www.ted.com/index.php/) was his notion that the copy write laws are being broken knowingly by todays youth - mostly because they (the laws) violate common sense. The result though, is that todays youth are becoming 'criminalized' or non-law abiding. And this trait can/will/might carry over from technology theft into other areas (the slippery slope effect.) The end result will/might be a lawless society (the snowball effect.)
Mr. Lawrence Lessig's presentation is also quite enjoyable. (20 minutes)
Why you should listen to him:
No expert has brought as much fresh thinking to the field of contemporary copyright law as has Lawrence Lessig. A Stanford professor and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society, this fiery believer foresaw the response a threatened content industry would have to digital technology -- and he came to the aid of the citizenry.
As corporate interests have sought to rein in the forces of Napster and YouTube, Lessig has fought back with argument -- take his recent appearance before the U.S. Supreme Court, fighting the extension of copyright protection from 50 to 70 years -- and with solutions: He chairs Creative Commons, a nuanced, free licensing scheme for individual creators.
Lessig possesses a rare combination of lawerly exactitude and impassioned love of the creative impulse. Applying both with equal dedication, he has become a true hero to artists, authors, scientists, coders and opiners everywhere.
"Lessig has built a reputation as the king of Internet law and as the most important next-wave thinker on intellectual property."
New York Magazine
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More about Lessing from Wired Magizine
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Issue 10.10 - Oct 2002
Lawrence Lessig's Supreme Showdown
The Great Liberator Lawrence Lessig helped mount the case against Microsoft. He wrote the book on creative rights in the digital age. Now the cyberlaw star is about to tell the Supreme Court to smash apart the copyright machine.
By Steven Levy
What's left of a dream is stored at the Stanford Law School library in 12 fat green loose-leaf binders and several legal boxes of supporting documents and briefs. They chronicle the 54 days that Lawrence Lessig, the Elvis of cyberlaw, helped Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson with the mother of all tech litigation: Department of Justice v. Microsoft. It was to be Lessig's greatest moment.
Once a "right-wing lunatic," he's become a fire-breathing defender of Net values.
In late 1997, after reading a profile of the super-brainy professor in the Harvard Law Bulletin, Judge Jackson had tapped Lessig to sort out the technical aspects of the case. "He was as knowledgeable as they come," says Jackson, who sits on the US District Court in DC. For the next two months, Lessig and his overqualified clerk, fellow Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain, worked almost nonstop to produce a report. Lessig's time logs, which document the 278 hours he spent on the case (billed at $250 per hour, a bargain rate for someone with his credentials), reveal only one day off: Christmas.
Some days he clocked 11 hours.
What the logs don't show is the quiet transformation Lessig had been undergoing, from a respected constitutional theorist into a fire-breathing defender of Net values. With the Microsoft case, he would be able to make his mark.
On February 3, 1998, Lessig called Microsoft and the government to a public hearing that was to be held in Boston in a few weeks, and flagged the courthouse administrator to prepare for what undoubtedly would be a huge media event. Lessig would use the forum to cut through the self-interested portrayals of the facts on both sides and draw a road map for resolving the thorny questions in cyberspace's grand shootout.
All the while, though, Microsoft had been maneuvering to get Lessig off the case. And that same day, the Federal Court of Appeals had the last word: Lessig was out.
His friends and admirers now view the episode as one that accelerated, by dint of publicity, the most brilliant career in Internet law. Lessig has since published two successful and influential books: The first, Code, is a groundbreaking deconstruction of the digital age. The second, The Future of Ideas, is quickly becoming the bible of intellectual property monkey-wrenchers. Lessig also founded a clinical law center at Stanford Law School, where he now teaches, and has launched Creative Commons, an ambitious project through which he hopes to establish a giant repository of works unfettered by restrictive copyright laws. In the realm of Internet politics and law, no one even approaches Lessig's stature. He is the chief theorist, the most respected mind, the most passionate speechifier. He is cyberlaw.
More than four years after his removal from the Microsoft case, the defeat, if you can call it that, still nags at Lessig. It is the opportunity missed. "Getting the appointment was a charmed thing," he says. "But I missed the chance to write the report. What I really wanted to do was get the right answer."
He had professorship, tenure, prestige. Then he discovered cyberspace.
On October 9, Larry Lessig will again claim a national spotlight.
In Eldred v. Ashcroft, his first argument before the Supreme Court — and only his second appearance before any court, in any venue — Lessig will attempt to convince the justices to overturn the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. To Lessig it is both an opportunity to make up for losing the prize that was snatched from him some four years ago, and a giant step in his crusade to stop a trend he fears may be inevitable: big-media dinosaurs controlling the Internet.
That's why the law professor has declared war on Mickey Mouse.
It is the third of July in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in a few minutes Larry Lessig is going to tell us how bad things are. Outside it is sweltering, but in Langdell Hall, where the Berkman Center of the Harvard Law School is holding a weeklong seminar, it is comfortably air-conditioned. Sitting in the corner of the lecture amphitheater — each seat wired with power plugs and Ethernet ports — he feverishly pecks on his Titanium laptop. He's wearing a checked Gap shirt and his trademark black jeans. Lessig looks like an intellectual. At 41, his face has the soft pallor of a life spent out of the sun. His features gather toward the center of his face, a configuration accentuated by tiny, Rumpole of the Bailey wire-rim glasses that barely cover his eye sockets. But Lessig's most distinctive feature is a startlingly high forehead; it's almost as if, in an attempt to accommodate his brain, the top of his head was pulled up a couple of inches, like an image stretched by Kai's Power Tools.
Normally, Lessig is a private, even shy, person. His students once asked him to tell them something about himself. He responded with one word: No. Before an audience, however, Lessig becomes electric.
"I was blown away," says Harvard Law's Charlie Nesson of the first time he saw Lessig teach. "He had the ethos, the spirit, the logic, and a Zen quality that goes right to the button." At times, Lessig seems more poet than lawyer. He isolates key phrases, repeating them, stretching them out, and luxuriating in their sound. Punctuating his themes are his distinctively styled PowerPoint slides that he creates using an obscure typewriter font downloaded free from a company called P22.
Today, Lessig is talking about the regulation of speech. He considers naive those who believe that the very existence of the Internet ensures free speech. That may have been part of the original Net code, he argues, but regulation may well disable that code. The freedom of the Internet didn't do much for Napster, did it? We may snicker that Congress is clueless, and chortle over the follies of record labels trying to catch up to the digital world. However, their laws and lawsuits have the potential to ruin the most idealistic aspects of the Net. Lessig believes it's already happening.
He is famously pessimistic about this trend. He has even referred to such pessimism as "my brand," joking that his agent has congratulated him for enhancing his brand identity with a perpetually bleak outlook. He calls it as he sees it, and when it comes to the Internet, his vision has proved sharper than anyone's.
It's not just a vision he's promoting — it's a cause. His speech and his slides tell his Harvard audience the story of a valued commons of ideas threatened by big powers. The vast majority of intellectual property used to be in the public domain; now most is available only by permission. He takes particular delight in singling out the Walt Disney Company as the symbol of how the past is using its power to kill the future. The company was a major lobbying force behind the Sonny Bono Act, the law that Lessig is urging the Supreme Court to overturn. The measure was only the latest extension of copyright — which the Constitution explicitly dictates should be "limited" — from an original 14 years to an automatic 70 past the death of the creator. Most notably, the law protects Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, from slipping into the public domain. (Lessig shows a clip of it in his PowerPoint presentation — fair use, one assumes.) The big problem, as Lessig sees it, is that continual extensions of copyright prevent anything new from entering the public domain. This is most ironic, notes Lessig, since Disney dredged the public domain for its most lucrative properties. A PowerPoint slide lists the examples, from Snow White to The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Because of the Bono Act, Lessig asserts, "no one can do to Disney as Disney did to the Brothers Grimm."
The Berkman crowd is predictably appreciative, but being lawyers, they don't get as rowdy as, say, the Usenet conference Lessig spoke to a couple of weeks before. "That was the first standing ovation I ever had," marvels the professor. And it wouldn't be the last. As the Eldred case approaches, Lessig has embarked on a sort of barnstorming tour of conferences and seminars around the world, inveighing about Hollywood's "insane rules," upbraiding like-minded geeks for not taking action, and advocating a "million-bit march" on Washington to urge politicians to understand and embrace intellectual property rights. As he neared the end of his tour, Lessig was frustrated. They stand and applaud, he told himself, but why don't they fight?
A couple of weeks earlier, I'd asked Lessig a slightly different question: Why do you fight? The very question propelled Lessig — who seems to casual observers so able and confident that he can resolve even the knottiest dilemma with a built-in Occam's razor — into a surprising bout of self-examination. But for a chronically straight arrow, Larry Lessig has always had a flair for surprise.
Lessig was born in 1961 in South Dakota. His father, Jack, was an engineer, and helped build silos for Minuteman missiles. Within a few years, the family moved to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where Jack bought a steel-fabricating company. Larry remembers Williamsport as "a tiny town — not tiny in population, but in its understanding of the world." Jack Lessig was doggedly traditional, and moral in a way that would have won Ayn Rand's approval: Once, when he underbid a job, he refused to change the assessment and performed the work at a loss. The family was churchgoing, law-abiding, and above all, faithful to the Grand Old Party. "I grew up a right-wing lunatic Republican," says Lessig.
As early as anyone can remember, Larry Lessig astonished people with his intellect. His sister Leslie (he also has two half-siblings from his mother's first marriage) recalls him as a second grader, running through the list of American presidents backward and forward. Though he engaged in the usual smart-kid stuff — stamp collecting, chemistry sets, a thing for Thomas Edison — his passion was politics. Specifically, the right-wing lunatic brand of his father. In high school, Lessig was an avid member of the National Teen Age Republicans, and he served as the governor of Pennsylvania in the mock government formed by this cadre of future country clubbers. Everybody around him thought young Larry would one day be president. (That was when a correlation existed between the White House and intelligence.) After high school, he planted his foot in the political ring by running the campaign of a would-be state senator. It was the summer of 1980, and Lessig was the youngest member of Pennsylvania's delegation at the Republican Convention that nominated Ronald Reagan. His state senate candidate got creamed. "It was lucky," says Lessig. "If he'd won, I would now be a political hack."
Disillusioned, Lessig entered the University of Pennsylvania, where his father and grandfather had graduated. Thinking he would follow his father into business, he studied economics and management, earning degrees in both. Once he graduated from Penn, his intellectual path was forever altered. He went to Trinity College in Cambridge, England, for what he thought would be an extra year of coursework. He wound up spending three years there studying philosophy. "I just fell in love with the place," he says. "For the first time, I really felt like I was ... serious."
He also latched onto a different sort of politics. It was the height of the Thatcher Revolution, and Lessig found himself siding with the workers. "I remember going to Cambridge as a very strong libertarian theist," he says. "By the time I left I was not a libertarian in that sense, and no longer much of a theist." He was, however, passionate about freedom, and in particular excited about the prospect of liberty emerging in the former Soviet sphere. "I was obsessed with Eastern Europe and Russia," says Lessig, who hitchhiked through the area (and eventually became involved in its intrigues). Certainly, the Larry Lessig who returned from Cambridge was a shock to his family. "He came back a different person," says his sister Leslie. "His views of politics, religion, and his career had totally flipped."
After earning his master's in philosophy, Lessig decided to shift to something more, well, real. Years earlier, another relative of Lessig's, an uncle named Richard Cates, had given him a lecture on the law. Cates had worked as counsel for the House Impeachment Committee, and in the midst of the Watergate furor visited the Lessig household. "Of course, in our house you couldn't talk about impeachment," says Lessig. "But I remember he and I went for a walk and wound up sitting on this cliff, and he told me about what the law was." This is the only place where reason controls power, Cates instructed his nephew. The moment stayed with Lessig, and in 1986 he entered the University of Chicago Law School.
Lessig spent only one year in Chicago, though. His girlfriend at the time got a fellowship at Yale, and so he transferred there, something that was possible only because he'd wowed his profs in first-year law. The shift wasn't just geographical: Chicago is known as a school where lawyers learn law; Yale's rep is more ephemeral, a place where theories are valued more than the dirty work of contracts and litigation. No problem for Lessig. "He stood out as a brilliant, broad-ranging intellect," says Yale's constitutional law guru Bruce Ackerman. "The kind of depth Larry has isn't so common." Lessig particularly fell in love with constitutional law. He decided he wanted to write about it and teach it himself. At Lessig's graduation, Ackerman told a startled Jack Lessig that Larry was going to be a great professor. The father looked like he'd been struck with a two-by-four. ("He doesn't have a lot of respect for academic types," says Lessig. Now, of course, Jack couldn't be prouder of his celebrated son.)
In the postgrad pecking order, Ivy League law school superstars compete for clerkships with federal judges. Then the cream of the cream rises to the elite fraternity of Supreme Court clerks. After Yale, Lessig served Judge Richard Posner, the sharpest legal mind in the country. Says Posner, "He was terrific, a tremendous worker who had a ferocious intensity." The judge now considers Lessig "the most distinguished law professor of his generation." Lessig completed the legal-giant quiniela by clerking for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. "His clerks hated me because I was a liberal," says Lessig.
Bound by the Supreme Court's ironclad omertà against divulging in-chambers skinny, Lessig can't discuss his work on decisions rendered during the 1990 to 1991 term. But he can talk about his participation in one revolution at the high court. For years, he had been a computer nut — after college he actually did some programming for a financial forecasting firm — and, as an aficionado of good computer design, he despised the clunky Atex system then used by the Supreme Court Printing Office. So Lessig joined with a few other clerks to convince the Supremes to stop, in the name of user-friendliness. The high point of this effort was a demonstration for justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Scalia, and David Souter. Using Lessig's own Dell machine, the clerks staged a software shoot-out between Atex terminals and PCs running desktop-publishing software. Lessig and his colleagues won the day. But to implement a new system, complicated adjustments to some of the PC applications were required. Lessig wound up doing the job himself, hacking "extraordinarily complicated macros inside of WordPerfect." (Talk about code being law.)
After his clerkship, Lessig took the bar exam, then decamped to Costa Rica, where he spent a month reading 35 old novels on a beach blanket. He'd already been hired to teach in Chicago. As Ackerman had predicted, Lessig was on track for an incandescent career as a professor. He passed the next few years teaching constitutional law at Chicago and studying the political transitions in Eastern Europe, even helping the Republic of Georgia write its own constitution.
He had his professorship, tenure, and prestige. He was set for life. "I made it," he says. "That was all I wanted to do."
Then he discovered cyberspace.
On a walk in New York's Greenwich Village one afternoon in 1993, Lessig noticed a headline in the The Village Voice: "A RAPE IN CYBERSPACE." It was Julian Dibbell's account of a virtual sexual assault in a MUD. Lessig had recently read Only Words, a book on sexual harassment by Catharine MacKinnon (he'd taken a course with her at Yale), and as he read Dibbell's piece, Lessig was struck by how closely the concerns of the participants in the virtual world (devastated by "only words") resonated with those of MacKinnon, whose radical views (porn isn't protected speech) were generally considered anathema at the Voice. This suggested to Lessig that cyberspace was virgin intellectual territory, where ideas had yet to be boxed in by orthodoxy.
"It was a place where nobody knows their politics," says Lessig. He began thinking about the concept of law in this nonphysical space, and made notes for a course on the subject.
Lessig taught Law and Cyberspace as a visiting professor at Yale in the spring of 1995. That semester he had his first intuition about the relationship between code and the law. In the course of discussing searches and the Fourth Amendment, a student wrote a paper about how Internet worms could search someone's computer and then disappear. It made Lessig wonder how new technologies could shape law. His thoughts led to something that flew in the face of his students' near-drunken optimism about the Internet: Restrictive code, whether embodied in legal regulations or in computer programs, could trump the seemingly unstoppable freedoms delivered by the Internet. At the time, John Gilmore's exultant claim that "the Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it" was widely accepted as truth. But Lessig began to think that it was less truism than wishful thinking. The right — or wrong — code could indeed implement censorship or surveillance or other injustices. "That insight," says Lessig, "became a central way of organizing the law of cyberspace."
Lessig began to develop his ideas into a book, and when he was offered a fellowship at Harvard in 1996, he decided to write it there. At the time, the law school's Charlie Nesson was beginning to organize the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, a branch of the law school devoted to cyberspace issues, and the administrator set his sights on hiring the field's first superstar. "We had to have him," says Nesson, who allocated half the center's $5.4 million initial budget to support Lessig as the Berkman professor. Lessig took the post in the summer of 1997 and was almost finished writing Code when, just before Thanksgiving, he got the call from Judge Jackson.
The formal appointment came on December 11. It was an unusual job — and unusually important. As special master, Lessig was given the power to gather information independently, examine witnesses, and evaluate technical data, all with the authority of the court. Then he would produce his own report and recommendations, which theoretically would provide a blueprint for Judge Jackson's eventual ruling and remedy.
Microsoft objected, claiming there was no legal basis for such a role. "We felt that only a federal judge, appointed by the president, could make such determinations," explains Microsoft's general counsel Brad Smith. During the first conference call Lessig organized between the opposing parties, Microsoft's lawyers told the putative special master that they would not be cooperating while his role was under dispute. Lessig politely but firmly informed them that he had a job to do, and would proceed whether or not they argued their side of the facts. Bluff called, Microsoft quickly changed course.
"I like your spirit!" Judge Jackson faxed Lessig after that showdown. "You have the makings of a federal court judge."
Lessig held several more lengthy conference calls between the participants, each time asking for more technical information. Ironically, the same issues he was seeking to resolve — like the effect of removing the Explorer browser from Windows — are items of contention in the current iteration of the lawsuit, almost five years later. Certainly, Microsoft had the opportunity to have a neutral legal observer navigate the complicated technical issues at a depth that a judge could not attempt. Instead, the company chose to use every measure available to block Lessig's participation.
Specifically, it claimed that he was not neutral. The Softie lawyers recast Lessig's various writings about "code" as an anti-Redmond rant. (In one passage, Lessig compared the relatively open Internet Engineering Task Force to the "absolutely closed Microsoft Corporation." Microsoft claimed this was equivalent to calling the company "a threat to political freedom.") Then they introduced what seemed like a smoking gun: an old email Lessig had sent then-Netscape executive Peter Harter, asking if his copy of Internet Explorer was messing up the bookmarks on his Mac. Lessig had made a joke about installing the software, putting a quote in parentheses: "Sold my soul and nothing happened."
"So Microsoft winds up saying I should be kicked off because I use a Macintosh," explains Lessig. "But they're also talking about how my language about code is political — code has values — and they would fill their briefs with this, as if I was some lunatic crazy."
Because Lessig was bound by confidentiality, he couldn't speak out. "This was his professional reputation at stake, and he couldn't respond," says Harvard Law's Zittrain. When Judge Jackson ruled on Microsoft's challenge, he predictably dismissed the company's objections, making it a point to call their attacks on Lessig "defamatory." Microsoft appealed. Lessig filed an affidavit explaining that the "sold my soul" line was actually a riff on a Jill Sobule song. "Its meaning in context was not the confession of some profound 'Faustian bargain,'" he wrote. "It was instead a facetious response to an anticipated tease in an email between friends." Lessig also insisted that the passages in his writings about Microsoft in relation to his theories of "code" were similarly neutral.
For Microsoft, the proceedings were just business, as Tony Soprano says. Nothing personal. Even though the controversy is over, company counsel Smith won't go on the record to say that Microsoft dealt unfairly with Lessig. However, he does allow that Lessig "is a principled intellectual thinker" who does not "have an animus toward anyone or anything." (Meanwhile, Lessig has since developed a friendship with Microsoft chief technical officer Craig Mundie; they're co-chairing a panel on identity and cyberspace.) In theory, when the Court of Appeals removed Lessig from the case, the judges could have added a line to the effect that they looked at Microsoft's claims against Lessig and found them without merit. The fact that they didn't still rankles him.
"You know, the Microsoft case was such a gift, and the problem was so interesting and fun," says Lessig. "Not getting a chance to finish was extraordinarily frustrating. And not getting a chance to finish it in the context where lots of people thought I was kicked off because I was biased was doubly frustrating."
At any rate, the episode helped get Lessig's name out. Code was published in 1999 to wide acclaim. Before the book arrived, cyberlaw was an amorphous collection of ideas and issues that awkwardly transferred current laws and regulations to the supercharged new digital landscape. Lessig gave the field a foundation with his sweeping analysis. He argued that the very architecture of software applications and the Internet comprised a sort of legal system unto itself, one that could be altered by outside forces. "Larry looked at an extant debate and said, 'This is the wrong debate,'" says Zittrain. "Once you hear it, [his theory] is obvious." By providing a framework to look at how law applied to the Internet and new technologies, Lessig had, in effect, lifted cyberlaw from the practice of a disparate group of lawyers, representing hackers or toiling in intellectual property or coping with spectrum regulation, into a coherent field of study.
Lessig had mapped the battlefield. It didn't necessarily follow that he should become a warrior. But he did. "Code was an academic book," he says. "There's an argument about how cyberspace is changing and how commerce will change cyberspace. And there's a frustration with libertarians who are oblivious to the sense in which it's regulatable. But it wasn't yet a movement." Writing Code, though, planted the seeds for an activist approach.
One of the potential consequences of Lessig's architecture-as-reality argument was that code could wind up protecting intellectual property — in theory, even to the detriment of free speech and conventional fair-use protections. Indeed, when viewing developments on the late-1990s Internet through that filter, Lessig saw that copyright holders were implementing such a system — boldly and expeditiously.
"The things I was pessimistic about [in Code] happened more dramatically and quickly than I thought they would," he says. "What turned me into an advocate was seeing how the law was being used [to implement] an extremist conception of intellectual property. It was dishonest, in a certain sense, an overreaching corruption of a political system." The Napster case was a prime example: By shutting down Shawn Fanning's peer-to-peer music distribution network, the record labels had ended an infinitely promising experiment. To Lessig, it was the classic move of a dinosaur using its heft to stifle innovation.
A different dinosaur tactic now occupies Larry Lessig: the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Because of Disney's role in juicing Congress to pass the bill, some have nicknamed it the Mickey Mouse Preservation Act. To Lessig, the extension was a power grab, particularly troubling in the world of the Internet, where copyright is a bigger club than in the predigital world. (Simply reading something on the Internet involves copying it, and the movement of files can be tracked.) Lessig had originally been excited by the Internet's potential as a vast commons of shared information. The Bono Act was a prime example of how the law could starve that commons. Working with the Berkman Center, Lessig set out to challenge the law.
"Sold my soul," he joked about Microsoft. The email became a smoking gun.
But how would he frame it? The obvious way was to say that with its most recent extension, Congress had finally gone beyond any reasonable interpretation of what the framers could have meant by "limited." That approach hadn't worked in the past, so Lessig constructed a different argument. In Article 1, Section 8, the founding fathers not only instructed Congress what to do regarding copyright — secure "for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" — but also stated why they should do it ("to promote the progress of science and useful arts"). Of course, Lessig's complaint includes the idea that Congress' continual extensions make a mockery of the word "limited" (one professor called it perpetual ownership "on the installment plan"). But the main thrust of Lessig's argument rests on the fact that, as with previous extensions, the Copyright Term Extension Act not only grants new copyright holders a longer term of exclusivity, it grandfathers in previous works. A retroactive extension of copyright clearly violates the Constitution.
In Lessig's view, the wigheads in Philadelphia had laid out a bargain for creators of intellectual property: We want you to develop original art and science, so we'll give you an incentive — a temporary monopoly on the use of your work. In theory, this means that Walt Disney would lay out the money to make a cartoon knowing that he'd have a certain number of years to collect the royalties. Yet granting Walt (or his heirs) a longer period for works created before most of us were born doesn't promote progress; Steamboat Willie is already here. Obviously, a retroactive extension can't provide an incentive — "Gershwin isn't going to write any more music," notes Lessig. To the contrary, the cause of "art and science" actually suffers under retroactive extensions, because works that otherwise would have been returned to the public are kept in private hands.
Lessig's arguments are controversial. Intellectual property lawyers generally never considered them: The very basis of their universe is the assumption that Congress can do whatever it wants with the copyright clause. "I am a great admirer of Larry Lessig," says Jack Valenti, Hollywood's master lobbyist. "But Congress has the power to say what 'limited' is. It's there, it's unambiguous. Fifty-five men in Philadelphia decided it, and there's no way a court can overrule that." When Lessig went to his colleague Arthur Miller, he heard much the same thing: Of course Congress can do this. (Miller later wrote an amicus brief in defense of the law.)
Lessig's response is fairly unlawyer-like. "This is one of those issues where you're not permitted to disagree," he says. "There are a lot of issues where that's fair. This is not one of them. They're just plain wrong. I believe that if they weren't working for clients who had millions of dollars hanging on it, if we sat down in good faith and talked about it, they'd come around to seeing it my way."
So Lessig and Berkmanites Nesson and Zittrain put together a team to launch the challenge, including corporate attorney
Geoffrey Stewart. Stewart considered Lessig "a genius," but was surprised by his passion. "He wasn't out to make a statement, but wanted to win," he says.
The next step was finding a plaintiff, someone suffering harm by the extended copyright period and the abuse of the Constitution it represented. Actually, several would be needed, each absorbing a different blow from that abuse. Lessig and his team collected a stellar cast. There was Dover Publications, forced to scrap its plans to publish The Prophet and Edna St. Vincent Millay's The Ballad of the Harp Weaver (both prevented by the act from entering the public domain). There was a nonprofit group dedicated to preserving old movies. (Because early films are protected — with copyright often assigned to owners who can't be traced — there's no incentive to save them from the ravages of erosion, and they're literally killed by copyright.) A choir director at an Athens, Georgia, Episcopal church who relied on public-domain sheet music. Two publishers of historical works. But the most important among them would be the lead plaintiff.
The obvious choice was Michael Hart, founder of the Project Gutenberg. For years, Hart had been posting text files of public-domain books on the Internet; his online library was approaching 6,000 titles. When Lessig and his colleagues flew to Hart's hometown of Urbana, Illinois, to explain the case, though, Hart was adamant that the Berkman team's briefs integrate his manifestos attacking the greed of copyright holders. Anything less, he felt, would make him a mere "figurehead." Lessig wouldn't compromise: "Our view was that populist appeals are great, but you've got to frame a constitutional argument." Finally, Hart said, "Enough — you can't use my name."
The Berkman team desperately cast about for another lead plaintiff. The answer was a 59-year-old former Unix administrator named Eric Eldred who publishes HTML-based works in the public domain from his cable modem-equipped house in New Hampshire. He wanted to use some early Robert Frost poems whose copyrights were due to expire — until the Bono Act dictated otherwise. And so Eldred became a name that may one day join Roe, Brown, and other famous plaintiffs in Supreme Court decisions. The complaint was filed in January 1999.
The first round took place in the DC District Court before Judge June Green. As is the custom, Lessig and his team filed their initial complaint and gathered supporting complaints from lawyers who joined the litigation. Kathleen Sullivan, the dean at Stanford Law, advised them on a friend-of-the-court brief charging that the Bono Act violated the First Amendment by restricting access to speech without the special scrutiny required in such circum-stances. The government's brief countered that Congress is free to set whatever term it feels is appropriate, period. In October, Judge Green sided with the government, on the briefs alone. "I wasn't surprised she upheld the statute," says Lessig. "I was just surprised she did it without allowing an argument." Strike one.
The Berkman team took the case to the Court of Appeals later that year. This was the first and only time Lessig appeared in court on behalf of a client. "It was one of the better arguments I've ever seen," says Geoffrey Stewart. "He knew all the cases, and there was no point too grand or too trivial to escape his grasp. At a certain point, the level of questioning changed from a classic appellate argument to a dialog of genuine give-and-take." Lessig himself was pleased: "I was nervous before it started, but once it got going it was great fun," he says. The proof, though, would be in the decision: Since an ultimate victory would come only in the Supreme Court, a favorable ruling wasn't absolutely necessary — yet if the decision unanimously upheld the law, there would be practically no chance the Supreme Court would agree to hear the case.
The verdict was 2 to 1 supporting the government. Strike two. Even so, Lessig got his dissent, from the most conservative judge. When the Berkman team asked the entire circuit to hear the case en banc, the request was denied 7 to 2, but they picked up another dissent, this time from a liberal judge. Those into reading legal tea leaves noted that such range made the case more attractive to the Supreme Court. However, most observers thought that the Supremes would leave it alone — and thus were surprised when the Court granted cert to the case earlier this year.
I catch Larry Lessig for our last interview at his office at Stanford, his home base since leaving Harvard in 2000. (He's still an affiliate at Berkman.) Lessig explains that his wife, lawyer Bettina Neuefeind, wanted to move to the West Coast, and Stanford offered him a chance to promote his brand of activist cyberlaw by starting new initiatives. The beginnings of a mini-empire have sprung up around Lessig at Stanford. First he formed the Center for Internet and Society, a combination think tank and law clinic that handles — and sometimes takes the lead litigating — cases involving civil rights and issues of digital technology. With the Creative Commons, he hopes to provide a technological means through which content creators can publish their work unconstrained by current copyright restrictions.
It's an ambitious project requiring complicated protocols that let authors tag their works as publicly available and help readers locate and reuse those works. "It's a conservancy, like a land trust, where people can get access to content in the public domain that otherwise wouldn't be there," says Lessig. Will people flock in droves to give their work away? It's an interesting question; Lessig, who adores the open source movement, is betting they will. "I think it could be widely used," he says. He plans to spend most of next year getting the organization off the ground.
After the interview, we whiz up Highway 280 from Stanford to San Francisco in Lessig's two-seater Audi TT sports car — purchased with his special master fees — for an informal dinner with his wife. She is a former student (Lessig, ever the picture of probity, assures me there was no funny stuff until three years after her graduation) who works in Oakland representing low-income defendants in housing cases. It's a different kind of lawyering than Lessig's: If she loses a case, her client is on the street.
Which takes us back to the issue of why he fights. Sometimes, in his own dark way, Lessig notes the lack of gritty urgency in his own work, and questions his direction. In an earlier interview I asked him why, of all possible causes, in a world fraught with terrorism, hunger, and oppression, he has chosen to storm the ramparts for the cause of intellectual property. It's something he's asked himself frequently.
"This is the first time I have an answer. There are issues I think are deeply unjust about our legal system, outrageously so. You know, the legal system for the poor is outrageous, and I'm wildly opposed to the death penalty. There are a million things like that — you can't do anything about them. I could go be a politician, but I just could never do something like that. But [cyberspace] was an area where, the more I understood it, the more I felt there was a right answer. The law does give a right answer."
Since that conversation, however, he's been working over the question and he's having doubts. Compared with his wife's involvement in the high drama of real life, what impact is he really making?
It's interesting that he's taking the question so seriously — but totally consistent with his glass-half-empty approach to life. From the outside, it seems that Larry Lessig's existence has been privileged. Nice upbringing. Ivy League education, then Cambridge and top law schools. The best clerkships. Tenured law professor. And now an acclaimed author, speaker, and, ultimately, Supreme Court litigator. Yet he doesn't see it that way at all. "I always feel I should have been better at each of those steps. I bring to it this expectation that there's a lot more somebody else could have done."
"So far I've lost, lost at every level."
What about Eldred v. Ashcroft, where Lessig took a case that no one thought plausible and now has it before the Supreme Court, with a chance to make history? Glass half empty. "So far I've lost," he says. "Lost at every level."
Still, those representing the dinosaurs of the old economy would be mistaken if they assumed that the introspection of the private Lessig in any way compromises the strength of the public Lessig. Fighting the government will be a mesmerizing speaker armed with the confidence of superior brainpower and a conviction that he's on the side of the angels. It was this belief that made his 278-plus hours as a special master a blissful idyll: Despite all the previous failed attempts to do so, Lessig felt he could see the right way out. And he feels it again now. "You know," he says, "going to the Supreme Court with this case — I created this case — is that kind of chance."
To anyone who's followed Lessig's brilliant career, the Microsoft episode is long over. But to the man himself, the legal boxes and loose-leaf binders he carried to Stanford are very serious baggage. On October 9, Larry Lessig will get his chance to finally leave it behind.
Contributing writer Steven Levy (steven@echonyc.com), the author of Crypto, profiled Stephen Wolfram in Wired 10.06.
Lawrence Lessig copyright liberator by Lyrical Expressionist Bernard Re, Jr at http://www.globalhome.com/paintings/2003/lessig.html Year: 2003 Medium: Oil Size: 4 x 6 Price: upon request
¿Qué precio un beso? Ésa es la pregunta que una corte francesa está intentando decidir en el caso de una mujer que besó una pintura todo-blanca del artista Cy Twombly american.
El SAM de Rindy, artista francés 30-year-old, fue el martes de ensayo en Avignon, Francia, en cargas voluntariamente de dañar una obra de arte. Lejos de un acto del vandalismo, el SAM dice, su beso era un "acto del amor." "no pensé. Cuando lo besé, pensé que el artista habría entendido, "SAM dicho durante su ensayo. Ella dijo que la "habían superado con la pasión" en ver untitled el trabajo. Los querellantes no convienen.
El lápiz labial dejado detrás por el beso impulsivo todavía está en la pintura y los restauradores tienen todavía encontrar una manera de quitarla. Llamaron para que el juez imponga una multa de 4.500 euros ($6.240) y solicitaron que el SAM atiende a un curso en buena ciudadanía. La pintura, que vale $2.830.000 estimados, es poseída por el colector Yvon Lambert. Él pedía $2.878.000 en los daños, que incluyeron el valor de la pintura y del coste de $47.000 restauraciones.
Twombly se conoce para sus pinturas abstractas que combinan técnicas de la pintura y del dibujo, las líneas repetidoras y el uso de la pintada, de letras y de palabras. Llevado en Lexington, la Virginia, en 1928, Twombly ha vivido en Italia por casi un mitad-siglo. Él ganó la concesión de oro prestigiosa del león en la Venecia Biennale en 2001. El ensayo de martes viene los días justos después de que otra pintura - d'Argenteuil de Le Pont "de Claude Monet impresionista francés del pintor" - fuera destrozada. Los intrusos, bebidos al parecer, se rompieron en el museo domingo temprano de Orsay de París y perforaron un agujero en el trabajo renombrado.
El ministro francés Christine Albanel de la cultura, reaccionando al incidente de domingo, prometió para buscar seguridad mejorada en museos y sanciones más fuertes contra las que desecrate arte.
Kiss on $2.8M painting more than just a kiss Last Updated: Tuesday, October 9, 2007 | 3:16 PM ET CBC News
What price a kiss? That's the question a French court is trying to decide in the case of a woman who kissed an all-white painting by American artist Cy Twombly.
Rindy Sam, a 30-year-old French artist, went on trial Tuesday in Avignon, France, on charges of voluntarily damaging a work of art.
Far from an act of vandalism, Sam says, her kiss was an "act of love."
"I didn't think. When I kissed it, I thought the artist would have understood," Sam said during her trial. She said she had been "overcome with passion" on seeing the untitled work.
Prosecutors do not agree. The lipstick left behind by the impulsive kiss is still on the painting and restorers have yet to find a way to remove it.
They called for the judge to levy a fine of 4,500 euros ($6,240) and requested that Sam attend a course on good citizenship.
The painting, which is worth an estimated $2,830,000, is owned by collector Yvon Lambert. He was asking for $2,878,000 in damages, which included the value of the painting and the $47,000 restoration cost.
Twombly is known for his abstract paintings combining painting and drawing techniques, repetitive lines and the use of graffiti, letters and words.
Born in Lexington, Va., in 1928, Twombly has lived in Italy for nearly a half-century. He won the prestigious Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale in 2001.
Tuesday's trial comes just days after another painting — French Impressionist painter Claude Monet's "Le Pont d'Argenteuil" — was vandalized. Intruders, apparently drunk, broke into Paris' Orsay Museum early Sunday and punched a hole in the renowned work.
French Culture Minister Christine Albanel, reacting to Sunday's incident, pledged to seek improved security in museums and stronger sanctions against those who desecrate art.
