Please Download Freely

Lawrence Lessig's new book Free Culture is out now - for free as a PDF download... It will be interesting to see how this plays out for the publisher. He spoke via videolink to an audience in Brisbane last week, to launch the Australian component of the Creative Commons project. Very interesting, and one of the most inventive uses of Powerpoint I've seen so far. Lessig eloquently made the point that his free release of the book (under a CC licence, of course) alongside printed versions will work out as long as the number of new readers attracted to the printed book through the free release of the PDF outweighs the number lost through downloading the PDF. If only other content publishers could see such common (or indeed any) sense. Anyway, looking forward to seeing more of this work as the CC project continues.

In other PDF-related news: I've been meaning to add a pointer to this for some time now - "Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution". Some interesting and enlightened views straight from the heart of darkness. So to speak.

Also a worthwhile read, from a more predictable source: "Unintended Consequences: Four Years under the DMCA" from the EFF.

And then there's BigChampagne - supposedly they provide stats on the most shared songs on p2p networks. But do we believe them?