Blogs: Lessig, Tweedy and Johnson [UPDATE 2006]

Friday, June 03, 2005 - 11:49 PM

Imaginify attended a Caltech lecture by Steven Johnson back in November 2004 and asked him some questions about Creative Commons, Free Culture and Open Source... Straight from BoingBoing via Lessig's blog: On April 7th 2005, the NY Public Library presented a conversation by Larry Lessig and Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, moderated by Steven Johnson, author of such books as Everything Bad is Good For You.

WHO OWNS CULTURE?
[torrent: video]
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from BoingBoing: "It starts out as a standard (which is to say, brilliant) Lessig presentation that runs about 20 minutes, but even if you've heard such before, the next hour-plus is a remarkable dialogue between Lessig and Tweedy, in which Tweedy really takes the fore, running down the artist's case for Free Culture, for embracing P2P and explaining that opposing P2P is pretty moot, given that P2P isn't going anywhere..."

What is bittorrent?

A peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution tool written by programmer Bram Cohen and debuted at CodeCon 2002. The reference implementation is written in Python and is released under the BitTorrent Open Source License (a modified version of the Jabber Open Source License), as of version 4.0.

With BitTorrent, files are broken into smaller fragments, typically a quarter of a megabyte each. As the fragments get distributed to the peers, they can be reassembled on a requesting machine in a random order. Each peer takes advantage of the best connections to the missing pieces while providing an upload connection to the pieces it already has.

An article from the Guardian, Fair Share (April 14, 2005)