Copynight: Staggs head Wed night (tomorrow)

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Hi, this is a monthly message from the Copynight Houston group.
A very quick somewhat belated message.
Meeting will be tomorrow August 31 Wednesday.
About meetings.
# Last Wednesday of each month, 7:00 pm
# Stagshead Pub, 2128 Portsmouth (close to Richmond/Shepherd)
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=2128+Portsmouth+Houston+Texas&num=1&spn=0.02%2C0.04
Update.
First, the Copynight debate went fairly well, though attendance was not as good as I would have thought.
Dwight Silverman from the Chronicle kind of covered it, though he had technical problems that interrupted his progress.
http://blogs.chron.com/techblog/archives/2005/07/copyright_debat.html
http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/copynight/
I have an mp3 version of the talk which I keep meaning to put online, but I haven't had the time. I will get it up as soon as possible.
To summarize the substance of the mp3: we focused more on copyright/artistic issues rather than the grokster/patent issues, although they certainly came up near the end.
Our musician on the panel ended up cancelling at the last day, which would have really been helpful. Unfortunately there was not enough time to find a replacement although apparently several people would have been happy to participate if I had more time to find them!
I've been working on a series of three essays about copyright and artistic issues. (Based loosely on the talk that I gave).
http://download.nowis.com/
Here's a link to Kimbrew McCleod's great book on copyright called Freedom of Expression. This is a really great book, not as political or academic as Lessig's book. IT talks more about music sampling and the panoply of lawsuits related to that. Lots of good anecdotes.
Here's a mailing list/discussion list I've found about copyright issues.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/copyright-future/
More artsy fartsy and lawyery than techy, but still a good mix.
One thing. Future gettogethers will be a little different. maybe a location closer to the westside; maybe special "guest stars" for future meetings. Also, I'd need to figure out some meetup arrangement so I get an idea of who might conceivably show up. Maybe every two months instead of one month. We can talk about it.
If you want to rsvp, drop a line, my email is robertdotnagle
at
fastmailbox.net
Finally, a quote from Lessig's book:
But fair use in America simply means the right to hire a lawyer to defend your right to create. And as lawyers love to forget, our system for defending rights such as fair use is astonishingly bad—in practically every context, but especially here. It costs too much, it delivers too slowly, and what it delivers often has little connection to the justice underlying the claim. The legal system may be tolerable for the very rich. For everyone else, it is an embarrassment to a tradition that prides itself on the rule of law. Judges and lawyers can tell themselves that fair use provides adequate “breathing room” between regulation by the law and the access
the law should allow. But it is a measure of how out of touch our legal system has become that anyone actually believes this. The rules that publishers impose upon writers, the rules that film distributors impose upon filmmakers, the rules that newspapers impose upon journalists—
these are the real laws governing creativity. And these rules have little relationship to the “law” with which judges comfort themselves. For in a world that threatens $150,000 for a single willful infringement of a copyright, and which demands tens of thousands of dollars to even defend against a copyright infringement claim, and which would never return to the wrongfully accused defendant anything of the costs she suffered to defend her right to speak—in that world, the astonishingly broad regulations that pass under the name “copyright” silence speech and creativity. And in that world, it takes a studied blindness for people to continue to believe they live in a culture that is free.

rj