Here is a super way to spend your next free lunch hour: watch and listen to Lawrence Lessig give one of his fantastic presentations:

• Changing Congress: Lessons Learned by a Copyright Activist, Lawrence Lessig. 4/2/2008, UCSB. [streaming video, about 1 hour].

He talks about history, politics, technology, copyright, and much more.

When Lessig found that he could not get reasonable changes to copyright law (even the late, eminent economist Milton Friedman said that the importance of stopping excessive copyright extensions was a "no brainer"), he realized there were bigger problems to confront. If Congress can't make the right decision when the problems are easy, how will it make the right decisions when the problems are difficult?

Lessig's new organization is Change-Congress. It is attempting to build tools that will help citizens ("in our pajamas," as Lessig says) create basic reforms in how our government functions. The Change-Congress home page features an interactive map created with data from the Federal Elections Commission and GovTrack.us and Google maps. The goal of the organization is to create tools that both candidates and citizens can use to pledge their support for basic changes to reduce the distorting influence of money in Washington.

Lessig is a professor at Stanford Law School, the founder of Creative Commons and the author of three very important books: Code, The Future of Ideas, and Free culture : how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity.

There are more videos from Change-Congress at: change-congress.blip.tv

If this is the first time you've seen one of Lessig's presentations, you are in for a treat. A colleague of mine called it "mesmerizing." There is a bit more about Lessig's presentation style in an analysis of it by Chris Tunnell on Lessig's blog: A physicist on the "Lessig style", by Chris Tunnell, April 28, 2008.

Here's a special weekend edition of lunchtime listens! A couple of weeks ago, Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive made news by challenging the FBI's illegal national security letter against the archive. The archive was also in the news because of Microsoft's decision to discontinue their live book search and the funding of the archive's Open Content Alliance book scanning project.

Now you can hear exactly what happened direct from Brewster himself. Listen to his interview a few days ago on This Week in Tech (TWIT). Happy listening!

Maybe I should name this west coast lunchtime listen ;-) Be that as it may, Clay Shirky gave a talk last month (click on the image to get to the video) at the Berkman Center for internet and Society covering some of the ideas from his incredible new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. The focus of the talk is Shirky's notions about the enabling power of the Web and along the way he has a lot of interesting things to say about sharing, conversation, collaboration and collective action. There's a lot of power in sharing and Shirky points to several interesting examples of that power.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Event Video/Audio)

The New York Public Library has lots of free audio and video (and text!) on iTunes! See: NYPL on iTunes U., by Barbara Taranto, NYPL, April 8, 2008.

If you have iTunes, here are some direct links to get you started:

• NYPL at iTunes
• Live from the NYPL
• Slate At 10: Online Media and the Future of Journalism (text)

I love love love This_American_Life. It's at the top of my podcast list (along with Studio_360 and Radio_Lab). The 3.28.08 episode, "The audacity of government" is particularly interesting from a govt information viewpoint. Ira Glass once again takes the strange but true anomaly, tells it in the first-person humanly and humanely to show the absurdity of, in this case, bureaucracy and governments. You can download it to your favorite audio player or listen online.

Act One. The Prez vs. The Commish.
Ira Glass tells the story of a little-known treaty dispute with far-reaching ramifications for our understanding of executive power. The dispute is between the President and one of his appointees...to the International Boundary Commission with Canada.

Act Two. This American Wife.
This American Life contributor Jack Hitt uncovers a strange practice within the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. If a foreign national marries a U.S. citizen and schedules an interview for a green card, but the U.S. citizen dies before the interview takes place, the foreign national is scheduled for deportation with no appeal—even if the couple has children who are U.S. citizens.

Act Three. 44.
Ira Glass interviews Charlie Savage, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Boston Globe, who's written a book called Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy about the ways the Bush Administration claims executive powers that other presidents haven't claimed.

Interviews with Innovators: Online Access to Public Information: Carl Malamud, IT Conversations, March 18, 2008.

For many years Carl Malamud has been a tireless crusader for online access to U.S. public information: SEC filings, patents, Congressional video, the Smithsonian's historical photgraphy, and most recently, case law. On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell asks Malamud about his strategies, accomplishments, and future plans.

This is an inspiring interview. If only there were libraries and library directors who had the simple, effective vision that Carl has!!

For some reason I just went back to review the keynote given by Karen Schneider -- aka Free Range Librarian -- at the 2007 Code4Lib conference. I found some really great practical tidbits for talking about open source in libraries as well as some food for thought. So please take the 50 minutes to sit back and enjoy Karen's most interesting talk. You'll be glad you did!

Below are some highlights:

• @ the 19min mark...seizing control of the tools we know we need to have and that we can create oursleves...we're really in a renaissance of librarian-built software for the first time it's like we're shaking ourselves awake and really grabbing hold, seizing the day. Librarian-built software begins to restore the balance of power in our profession...
• @27min mark (slide 16), there's an interesting exchange about open source including stereotypes of open source and how to talk to directors about open source at @ 36min.
• Slide 32 = every library needs a developer
• 48min mark = Q&A from Dan Chudnov discussing free software and Schneider's over-simplification that there's no free software. Dan points out that there's a higher level of conversation about free software that needs to happen.

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We're not all work and no play at FGI. So, here is something we have been waiting for and are excited that it is now online. It is http://www.titlepage.tv/ and they describe it and their first episode this way:

There's never been anything like it online. We bring together four of today's top authors at a time for unscripted, passionate conversations about their work.

We couldn't be more proud of our first episode. Richard Price, Colin Harrison, Susan Choi, and Charles Bock gave us an inside look at their latest novels, but the conversation didn't stop there. Harrison taught us how to salvage a story by introducing a new character; Bock told us how his acclaimed first novel almost ended up in a drawer; Choi explained why she didn't identify the home country of her main character; and the very organized Price admitted that he writes "outlines for my outlines" when preparing a novel.

Unlike many other sites, we do ask our visitors for an attention span. This first show runs to about an hour, but trust us -- the time flies.

Today also marks the debut of our other features, including blogs, additional book recommendations, and interactive forums where you can start your own passionate conversations with fellow readers.

Enjoy!

danah boyd has done some of the best and most creative research on social networking, particularly how teenagers are using technology. She is a PhD candidate at the School of Information (iSchool) at the University of California Berkeley. She describes her research this way:

My research focuses on how people negotiate a presentation of self to unknown audiences in mediated contexts. In particular, my dissertation examines how American teenagers socialize in networked publics like MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Xanga and YouTube. I am interested in how the architectural differences between unmediated and mediated publics affect sociality, identity and culture.

She is a dynamic speaker, prolific blogger, and insightful, passionate researcher. If you have never heard danah speak, I recommend watching this brief video! It should be of interest to anyone who wants to understand how young people are using technology and that should be all librarians because that is affecting how they use (and expect to be able to use) the  library and its  services. (It starts off looking like it is going to be a beer ad, but stick with it; that's just showing where the interview was held.)

• Video Interview with danah boyd, Discover Magazine (Feb 12, 2008). 14 minutes. (here is an alternate link to the same video)

This week the British library released a report of research designed "to identify how the specialist researchers of the future, currently in their school or pre-school years, are likely to access and interact with digital resources in five to ten years' time." (See "Google Generation Myth" Report.)

The Library has provided a recording of the press conference of the release of the report at the British Library on January 16, 2008.

• Recording of the Wednesday 16 January launch event (MP3, 77min 22sec, 66.3MB)

The recording includes:

• Lord Triesman, Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Innovation, Universities, and Skills: keynote speech (minutes 2-17)
• Ian Rowlands and Professor David Nicholas, the report's authors from the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) at the University College London (minutes 17-30)
• Dr Malcolm Read, Executive Secretary, JISC (minutes 30-37)
• Dame Lynne Brindley DBE, Chief Executive British Library (minutes 37-46)
• Questions and Answers

Yes we've talked a lot and linked a lot to Laurence Lessig but only because the issues he raises in terms of copyright are so compelling, especially for librarians. Here's a clip of his recent talk at the TED Conference in March, 2007, "How creativity is being strangled by the law." This will probably be his last public presentation about copyright seeing his much written-about announcement of a shift in academic focus from copyright to corruption. While we will miss his voice in support of the public domain -- not to mention his work with creative commons and the hilarious remixes -- we look forward to his no-doubt-equally-provocative presentations on his new bailiwick. Enjoy!

Happy Friday! Please check out GOOD COPY BAD COPY - a documentary out of Denmark about the current state of copyright and culture. Our good friend Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate Party makes some extremely valid points about the need to balance individual privacy rights with copyright; right now, content owners like the RIAA and MPAA are stomping on individual privacy rights which is unacceptable to him and to many others. Many others on both sides of the argument make appearances on the film -- like Laurence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Dan Glickman (CEO of MPAA).

We'd love to hear your ideas and perspective about file sharing and copyright.

In his new book Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, Charlie Savage documents how the Bush administration has expanded presidential power and limited the checks and balances of Congress and the courts. In an interview with Terry Gross he outlines many of the key points of his book:

• Charlie Savage, In Pursuit of the Imperial President, Interview of Charlie Savage by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, (September 5, 2007)

A transcript is available on LexisNexis and Factiva and the audio is also available as a podcast.

Savage describes some of the expanded executive powers this way:

...the ability to unilaterally pull out of a treaty without consulting the Senate as Bush did in the anti-ballistic missile treaty in December of 2001, which means some future president who doesn't like NATO or the UN could just say, 'We're out,' and we would be out. The ability to impose martial law over the objections of a state governor. The ability to hold a US citizen without trial or without charges perpetually by naming them an enemy combatant. The ability to keep all matters of documents and government activity secret from lawsuits and from Congress in a much broader fortress of secrecy than previous presidents have enjoyed. A much more aggressive use of the ability to shut down lawsuits simply by uttering the magic words 'state secrets.'"

And he says that the implications reach far into the future:

...the Bush administration could leave office entirely tomorrow and the agenda will already have been completed.... The strategy was, 'We are going to permanently expand the power of the presidency as an institution for all future presidents to wield. We are going to throw off the restraints that were imposed in the '70s after Watergate and Vietnam. We are going to magnify the powers that the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. dubbed "the imperial presidency," which had arisen just in the first couple of decades of the Cold War, peaked under Nixon and were sort of brought under control again after Watergate and Vietnam.'

Charlie Savage covers national legal affairs for "The Boston Globe" and won a Pulitzer Prize for investigation into President Bush's use of executive signing statements.

Here is a good lunchtime listen:

• Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators: Greg Elin, Chief Architect, Sunlight Foundation, ITConversations (2007-08-18)

If you want a preview, read Udell's blog post about the interview here:

• A conversation with Greg Elin about the Sunlight Foundation Jon Udell, August 20, 2007.

The Sunlight Foundation aims to make the operation of Congress and the U.S. government more transparent and accountable.

You may or may not remember that I posted a couple of weeks ago about Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate party giving a talk at Stanford. For those who missed the talk, the video is now available as well as several other talks that Rick did while traveling to the Open Source Convention and the Bay area.

Many thanks to Stanford Libraries and the Center for Internet and Society for co-sponsoring the talk and for Henrik Bennetsen and Galen Davis of the Stanford Humanities Lab for videotaping the well-attended and interesting event!

Leave us comments and let us know what you think about Rick's ideas for reforming international copyright.