Earth: Mostly Harmless

Lawrence Lessig’s other court case

A remarkable turn of events in a case I sadly wasn’t aware of before this article was published. It involves Larry Lessig, founder of the Creative Commons project, who is currently pursuing a negligence action on behalf of a former pupil of the American Boychoir School, where Lessig himself was evidently abused as a boy. The article linked to below also includes a profile of the reluctant public figure that is Harvard Law’s star professor. At times it is biting in criticism of Lessig’s intellectual record but is nonetheless generally affectionate towards him. Worth a read.

Lawrence Lessig’s other court case:

A dramatic update on Professor Lawrence Lessig’s other court case written by his friend John Heilemann appears in New York Metro magazine this week. And this is a battle that critics as well as supporters are praying will end in victory for the lawyer and scholar this time.

Lessig is representing John Hardwicke, who like himself is a former pupil of the American Boychoir School (now the Columbus Boychoir School) in Princeton, New Jersey. Hardwicke claims he was abused by multiple staff including the music director. The school argued it should be immune from such negligence lawsuits, and a trial court had agreed. Incredibly, the school even claimed the sex between now fugitive choir director and Hardwicke was consensual. The case was heard by the state’s supreme court, and in what reads like a movie script, the evidence turned on Lessig himself.

In the court room, Lessig tore up the rule book and confronted years of private torment by revealing that he had been abused himself at the school.

“It was the perversion of this music director . . . to believe that sexual abuse was part of producing a wonderful boychoir,” he disclosed to the court. Lessig said he knew that this was what the director believed, because the director himself had disclosed this to Lessig at the school.

(Via The Register.)

Blogschool - A cautionary tale…

Blogschool:

Found on Blogshares (currently down after a DB Crash)

(Via Sen No Sen.)

Take that, xxAA!

One Torrent to bind them, one Torrent to rule them all!

Bram Cohen has posted a beta of a trackerless BitTorrent client. Once it goes final it’s expected to make the MPAA, BSA and RIAA’s elaborate game of litegation Whack-a-Mole even more difficult, as noted by ZDNet Australia. As well as that, it should speed things up, presuming that torrent files will now get wider distribution and swarms will become bigger. Here’s Slashdot’s lowdown:

Trackerless BitTorrent Beta Posted:

jgarzik writes “BitTorrent development is occuring at a furious pace. At the beginning of May, an Azureus update added distributed tracker and database features. Yesterday, Bram updated BitTorrent to include support for trackerless torrents in the new BitTorrent 4.10 beta.”

(Via Slashdot.)

Clicky clicky!

Note: This was originally posted on an older revision of this blog hosted somewhere else, so it doesn’t make sense in its current context. Just here for completeness.

This weblog is now enabled for Safari-powered blue squidgy address bar RSS button goodness!

Winer Whines to ‘Dixie’

Okay, yesterday I noted the need to sort the “wheat from the chaff” in blogs and podcasts. Now, you wouldn’t expect Dave Winer, pioneer of blogging, XML-RPC Frontier and Manila, to come into the ‘chaff’ category - but yesterday’s podcast is pretty dubious!

Scan forward to 1m 55s, and you’ll hear Dave’s… rendition of ‘Dixie’ - him ’singing’ with a MIDI file (played through a terrible software synth)…

On today’s podcast I ponder…:
On today’s podcast I ponder the possibilities for tomorrow’s broadcast podcast for KYOU-AM in San Francisco. More singing this time with the MIDI of Dixie. You’ll have to wade through it to get to the talk. Also includes philosophy from Ed Cone and Rogers Cadenhead.

(Via Scripting News.)

Winer also posted an expletive-laden entry criticising Adam Curry’s claims to have invented Podcasting:

I winced a half-dozen times reading this interview with Adam Curry. He didn’t invent podcasting, he didn’t figure out that RSS would be a good transport. And he didn’t write the first iPodder. Here’s what Adam actually did do. He figured out the last yard was important and worked tirelessly to get people to listen to him. I was the only one who did, and I turned that idea into RSS with enclosures, and wrote the first iPodder, in 2001, three years before Adam claims to have done all this stuff. I never denied him credit for his role in this work, quite the opposite, I praised him every way I could for his insight. I also did regular podcasts for a couple of months before he started. He was listening to them, calling me all the time, ecstatic at how I was reinventing radio. There are a couple of ideas in Daily Source Code that didn’t come from me, and for that Adam deserves full credit and our thanks. But these lies have gone on and on, he just doesn’t stop.

He then threatens to:

kick him in the ass, and then look him in the eye and say “Shouldn’t have lied so much, dickhead.”

Someone has not taken all of zee pills zis morning, no?