“Pillow Fight Democracy” is about to have its swing—this Friday I’ll be speaking at a WEA function in Port Townsend:

Following London and other cities, San Francisco and Portland recently had thousands of ordinary citizens flash mob public places for spontaneous massive pillow fights. Why is this important? What can we learn from this?

• What pillow fights can teach us about the web
• Blogging—the technology and the people
• Political organizing online— now and in the future

I promise to all attendees I’ll try and make it worthy of skipping your St. Patty’s Day home-cooked corned beef, cabbage, and green beer. (Tall order I know.)

Pillows optional, but highly recommended. See you Friday.

We think it’s time for Congress to heed the warning of George Orwell.

To that end, we’re asking for your help: Mail us or drop off your tattered copies of “1984.” When we get 537 of them, we’ll send them to every member of the House of Representatives and Senate and to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Feel free to inscribe the book with a note, reminding these fine people that we Americans take the threat to our liberties seriously. Remind Congress that it makes no sense to fight a war for democracy in a foreign land while allowing our democratic principles to erode at home.

Remind President Bush that ours is a country of checks and balances, not unbridled power.

Perhaps our nation’s leaders can find some truth in this fiction and more carefully ponder the road we’re traveling.

The Oakland Tribune

Note the delicate sidestepping of the ever so popular, “smoke if you got em” headline. As of midnight tonight Initiative 901 goes into effect, barring smoking inside all of Washington State’s public places. This is something I’ve been looking forward too for a long time.

I do lament the fact that this legislation became enacted via initiative however—too often the “by the people” process is co-opted by special interests, and I believe leads to overzealous law. Take for example the 25-foot provision of I-901, where smokers are banned from smoking anywhere near a public building. Why go this far?

1. A 25 foot rule can easily lead to heavy-handed enforcement
2. Will cause smoker / non-smoker resentment
3. Will most likely do nothing to aid the issue
   Smokers cannot and will not remain 25 feet from all restaurants and bars, which would leave them in the middle of the street in urban areas (at best), and is more closely a total ban of smoking in the public sphere.

I am very grateful for the ban, and will no doubt visit many more of my local bars because of it. I have no doubt in the future our public spaces will be looked upon as our airplanes are now, “you mean, people used to be allowed to smoke in here?”

Cigarettes are vile, and I’m tired of burning my clothing (this becomes costly) after I’ve strayed too long in an smoke-dense bar. So light up while you can smokers of Washington! Soon all you’ll have is your own home and a crowded intersection to pleasure your lungs.

BetterDonkey’s got a new video called Viaduct Tape. A hilarious “no on I-912” piece.

• 8MB — (.MP4 Quicktime)
• 6.8MB — (.WMV Windows)

Nice work everyone.

Here it is, Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. a 324kb PDF o’ change. Back in March I screamed save betamax, save innovation and on first glance when one sees a 9-0 landslide you’d think I again would have something to scream about, and of course you’d be right.

SUPREME COURT JUSTICES ARE TOO OLD FOR US CRAZY KIDS

To prove my point, Justice Souter wrote the decision for the court, which included this legal gem:

We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by the clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.

I can’t gag back the feeling that broad rulings like this one by the Supremes are just cop-outs—let’s toss it back down around the lower courts for a while and see what bobs back up? There I said it, now let me quote Siva Vaidhyanathan of Salon.com who is more than a tad more eloquent than I.

If the lower courts read the court’s ruling broadly, watch out: This could severely restrict other, more important innovations for decades to come. Even without broad readings, the courts could soon be filled with frivolous copyright suits against technology companies — handing big entertainment companies like MGM a potent economic weapon to wield against smaller innovators and upstarts that are developing new devices and models of distribution. Souter struggled to construct a decision that would not impede the inventor in her garage who is tinkering away at the next great thing. The problem is, she will definitely have to hire a lawyer now.

Vaidhyanathan continues by postulating that the darlings of the post-com could be the biggest intellectual property violators of them all:

What about Google? Consider this: Google, like Grokster, is primarily a search engine. Its business model relies on advertisements. And the more we use Google, the more money it makes. Like Grokster, Google resolves communication queries. It generates a link from an information provider to an information seeker. And almost all of what it delivers is copyrighted.

As frustrating as a ruling like this is, I don’t think it’s potent enough to stifle innovation but also not fairly grounded enough to form a cogent platform for protecting IP. Some have said it is clearly a ruling against P2P, but I believe it is obviously not and it certainly won’t make much of a difference in the use of such networks, only in the quantity of lawsuits surrounding them.

The BetterDonkey.org launch party was a huge success. We rented a space in Belltown, bought multiple kegs of beer and cases of wine, had hundreds of guests and raised the group’s profile 10-fold…and we MADE money. What’s wrong with this picture? Absolutely nothing I suppose.

I’ve been busy lately but I’ve almost got something to show for it for on Wednesday we’ll be launching BetterDonkey.org, where our fledgling group will have a blogging platform, mailing list and member organization, event calendar, and other fine Web goodies. Guess who designed it? (Needless to say the site will be gorgeous.) February 12th with luck will see our launch party too- all are invited! I’ll e-mail out some specifics when the contract has been signed on the space we’ll be renting. Kegs of extremely inexpensive beer, cases of truly cheap though flavorful wine, good loud music, and good loud people- what more could one want?

Reading…

What elst, thou queries? I’m reading of course: while still awaiting the first issue of MAKE, the book club is on The Devil in White City, and I’ve started chewing on Digital Media Revisited, which was kindly supplied free of charge by NGale.

Tonight while checking the status of a few of my domain names, I ran upon this rather comical post regarding some ill-fated SuperBowl ads. Any company that gets two ads rejected by FOX makes me a proud, proud customer. (Via boing boing) I also saw a few interesting glacier pics of my old stomping grounds of Glacier Bay. Though the photography demonstrates rapid glacial retreat I can attest that at least one glacier in the bay is advancing. (Thus proving science and global warming a complete fallacy.) Also of note in this evenings web-scavanging is an IHT article speaking of the shrinking Google-gap (that’s my name for the superior performance of Google over other search engines). Search could very well be the most drastically changed part of our digital universe in the coming decade, and I’m not just thinking engines here…more on my pie in the sky theories later.

Ethics. Morality. Post election 2004 these terms are tossed around the political arena like beads at Mardi Gras. Perhaps that keyword callousness is the reason the Republican House pushed through a party-line vote to neuter the Ethics Committee rules? The party of morality apparently doesn’t believe ethics should apply to them.

The change in the House rules will make it much more difficult to file an ethics complaint (like the five previous ones issued to majority leader Tom DeLay). Even Republican Ethics Committee Chairman Joel Hefley has said this is “a terrible mistake.” Oh wait, rumor has it Hefley’s going to be removed from his post.

Do ethics simply need not apply to the majority, or have the House Republicans so quickly turned their backs on the “morals” that got them there?