Luis Villa's Internet Home

It is pouring out. I’d meant to go to Duke Gardens and start on Wealth of Networks again, but clearly not going to happen today. Instead, a quick linkdump and then a search for some local foraging.

• Matt Asay elaborates a bit on my musings on social production and lawyers. Matt is right to emphasize that lawyers often can’t solve conflicts; often they can’t solve anything. My hope is that we can, however, help put the pieces in place so that conflicts are reduced and social producers can instead focus on growing better communities and producing better stuff.
• Tim Lee elaborates, well, on my riff on tollbooths and bridges the other day. If I didn’t make sense to you, go read his post instead :) Best comment: “It is the consistent inability to see itself as an agent supplying something that a customer actually wants, rather than as the owner of a mine from which to extract monopoly rents, that will eventually do-in MS.”
• Interesting little Wu piece on Zittrain’s generative internet. I think his criticisms of Zittrain’s vision are right on, particularly the part about the motivation being commercial control with security being primarily only a thin excuse. My fear is that Wu may overestimate the PC industry’s commitment to openness- I’m not sure that customers value it all that much, and if customers don’t value it, the PC industry won’t either.
• By the time I left Cambridge, I was really sick of Boston, and I wasn’t a big fan of most Harvard students. (Some rock, of course.) The only reason I applied to Harvard was because the faculty at the Berkman center is so mind-blowingly good. The rich, it turns out, often get richer. I won’t say I’m bitter, because I am finding myself loving New York, I’ve enjoyed most of my classmates at Columbia, and the faculty here are excellent and have even exceeded my high expectations (not to mention the other cyberlaw faculty elsewhere in New York that I have access to). But especially with the addition of Prof. Benkler there is no doubt that the best place on earth to discuss internet law will be over the lunch table at the Berkman Center, and I am a touch wistful about that.
• More on presentation techniques; this time, about preparation. Look forward to trying that next time I have to speak. (See also slide deck on ‘how to piss off the music industry for fun and profit‘.)
• Good introductory post about community-building.
• I’m traveling a lot this summer (almost every other weekend) so I need to look more into carbon offsets. This looks like a good place to start. (I don’t remember if I mentioned it here, but my power in NYC is now wind-generated, which is cool.)
• Apropos my rants last summer about P2P, some thinkers weigh in on the decline(?) of P2P.
• I sometimes feel like this is how most lawyers and MBAs think of compsci majors.
• Politics link; don’t follow unless you want to be enraged for the rest of the day. Nutshell: the ‘enhanced interrogation’ term my government is now using as an Orwellian euphemism for torture, and indeed many of the same ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques, are quite literally straight out of the Nazi playbook. I normally am skeptical of demands that US leaders be exposed to war crimes trials, because often those demands are motivated by politics and hatred of the US rather than any actual search for justice. But it may be time to seriously consider the issue. (See also. We have truly become what we most claimed to abhor; the terrorists really have won.)
• James Grimmelman ponders a favorite topic of mine- the parallels between law and computer science. And here I’d wanted to write the definitive blost post on the topic. Oh well. :)