Aaron Swartz committed suicide last week.  He was 26, a genius and my friend.  Not a really good friend, but someone I had worked with off and on for 11 years, liked a lot, had laughed with frequently, occasionally shaken my head over and deeply admired.

An Intellectual Property System for the Internet Age

James Boyle

In November 2010, the Prime Minister commissioned a review of the Britain’s intellectual property laws and their effect on economic growth, quoting the founders of Google that “they could never have started their company in Britain” because of a lack of flexibility in British copyright..  Mr. Cameron wanted to see if we could have UK intellectual property laws “fit for the Internet age.”   Today the Review will be published. Its conclusion?  “Could it be true that laws designed more than three centuries ago with the express purpose of creating economic incentives for innovation by protecting creators’ rights are today obstructing innovation and economic growth?  The short answer is: yes.” Those words are from Professor Ian Hargreaves, head of the Review.   (Full disclosure: I was on the Review’s panel of expert advisors.)

A slideshow and downloadable book remembering Keith in words and pictures.  You can order a glossy, high quality copy of the book itself here from Createspace or here from Amazon.  We tried to make it as beautiful as something Keith would create.  We failed. But we came close; have a look at how striking it is… all because of Keith’s art.

Our friend, colleague, co-author and brilliant artist and scholar Keith Aoki died yesterday in his house in Sacramento.  He was 55 years old.

The Brookings Institution has organized a volume on “The Future of the Constitution” edited by Jeff Rosen and Benjamin Wittes and featuring articles by me, Larry Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain, Tim Wu and many others.  How will our constitutional tradition deal with the challenges posed by new technologies?  The topics range from possible personhood claims by artificial intelligences, to the future of free speech and the Net, to neuroscience and criminal punishment.  The essays are freely available online. Details after the jump.

My new FT column is up. Shakespeare, copyright, Scott Turow and a shadowy group of law professors..  What could be more fun? Ungated version after the jump. 

What Could Have Been Entering the Public Domain on January 1, 2011?

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My new column for the FT is up.  It deals with the incredible weakness of the data on which our intellectual property policy proceeds.   Ungated version after the jump

Nora Young and the folk at CBC’s Spark have done it again, with a really nicely presented episode that includes a feature on copyright.  Nora interviews me about the history of copyright…  in 5 minutes.

Is here. I appear at 3:25 or so.

On November 8th, Cory Doctorow, John Perry Barlow, and numerous other digital luminaries will be gathering at the Minna Gallery in San Francisco for the EFF’s Pioneer Awards Party.  Cory is going to be the MC and — when not featured on XKCD blogging from a ballon in a red cape and goggles…

Great hour long radio show on net neutrality from NPR’s The State of Things.  Me, the inimitable Paul Jones of iBiblio, and Ryan Radia of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.  Frank Stasio is just a great interviewer.  Listen to it here. 

We have a centerfold Op Art comic on “Copyright’s Futures”  in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.  The comic is

This isn’t a post about intellectual property or the networked society, so if your interests only run that far, cease reading here.  In the late 80′s and early 90′s refugees were attempting to escape what was, in a decidedly non metaphorical sense, a hellish situation in Haiti..

Nitya Rajan interviewed me at Orgcon about why the legislative process malfunctions particularly badly on digital policy, and what the creation of civil society groups could do to fix that.  Video after the jump.

My new Financial Times column on the creation of a science commons is now up.  For the ungated version, read on…

Here is the video of my speech in Vienna at the IRF symposium.  The title was What If the Web Really Worked for Science? Reimagining Data Policy and Intellectual Property.

I just started writing a column for the Huffington Post.  (I will still be writing for the FT.)  My first column is on the Google-Verizon announcement.  Not the “what” but the “why?”

The Open Rights Group held its first big conference — ORGCON — in London last month and I was really honoured to give the keynote.  The Twitter cascade behind me, however,

If one gets a lot of e-mail, one will eventually get very strange e-mail, but there is a frontier; an event horizon of bizarreness, that one doesn’t expect to be surpassed.  But life is richer than that.

Colleagues at Catolica University in Lisbon and the European University Institute in Florence have very kindly asked me to give lectures next week on “Cultural Agoraphobia”

Brooke Gladstone of On the Media interviews me about the birth, change and metastasis of copyright;

What if you could own the facts of the news?…..  Would that save the news industry?