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So my blog turns seven today. On August 20, 2002, while hiding north of San Francisco working on the Eldred appeal, I penned my first (wildly and embarrassingly defensive) missive to Dave. Some 1753 entries later, I'm letting the blog rest. This will be the last post in this frame. Who knows what the future will bring, but in the near term, it won't bring more in lessig.org/blog.

The reasons are many.

First, as I peer over the abyss of child number 3 (expected in a couple weeks), I can't begin to imagine how I would be able to allocate the time to give this space the attention it needs. I've already fretted about my failure to give this community the time it deserves in REMIX. Things will only get worse.

Second, even if I could, I'm entering a stage of my work when the ratio of speaking to reading/listening/thinking is changing significantly. I've just taken up my role as director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. As announced, this means the launch of a 5 year research project on institutional corruption. While I expect that project will have a critical cyber-presence, I don't want its life to be framed by this blog. The mission, the understanding, the community is different.

Third, even if I could, and even if the work I was doing meant I should, there's an increasingly technical burden to maintaining a blog that I don't have the cycles to support. Some very good friends -- Theo Armour and M. David Peterson -- have been volunteering time to do the mechanics of site maintenance. That has gotten overwhelming. Theo estimates that 1/3 of the 30,000 comments that were posted to the blog over these 7 years were fraudsters. He's been working endlessly to remove them. At one point late last year, Google kicked me off their index because too many illegal casino sites were linking from the bowels of my server. I know some will respond with the equivalent of "you should have put bars on your windows and double bolted locks on your front door." Maybe. Or maybe had legislatures devoted 1/10th the energy devoted to the copyright wars to addressing this muck, it might be easier for free speech to be free.

This isn't an announcement of my disappearance. I'm still trying to understand twitter. My channel at blip.tv will remain. As will the podcast, updated as I speak. I will continue to guest blog at Huffington Post. And as Change-Congress.org enters a new stage, I hope to be doing more there. But this community, this space, this board will now rest.

Thank you to the endless list of people who have helped make this place as it is, or was. Theo and M. David especially. Marc Perkel for his free hosting at ctyme.com for so many years. And thank you especially to the inhabitants of this space, especially the fantastic commentators and loyal backbenchers (Three Blind Mice, you have to reveal yourself now and let me buy you a beer). I have enjoyed this wildly more than I have not (again, I whine in REMIX about the not). And I have been very proud to be responsible for certain bits of content -- especially the guest blogging by the interesting and famous (Howard Dean was a favorite, and I will always be proud that I got Judge Posner to experiment with blogging, leading to his wonderful blog with Gary Becker).

Comments on this post will remain open for a week. And then comments on all posts will be locked.

Thank you to everyone, again.

Five-year old Felix's mom, Kierstin, sent me this image a bit ago. "I thought you would get a laugh out of these photos where your Remix became a crucial supporting wall for a Medieval Castle, manned by Playmobile guards and a plastic dinosaur." Indeed....

Dave Wiley has an interesting idea he calls unmixing (in contrast to remixing), which he demonstrates with the first bit of REMIX. Basically, using Yahoo's BOSS, he reassociates every three words to another text on the web. Give it a look. (I think I'd call it re-remixing).

So you're likely not to recognize the term -- in all caps, PACER -- but if you do, the amazing sorts at the Stanford Law Library are trying hard to organize attention to getting this essential service radically improved. You can help here.

The wonderful Michael Geist has a site to facilitate organizing and thought around "the first Canadian public consultation on copyright policy since 2001."

Code v2 in Chinese.

This is fabulously cool: iFixit has built a teardown platform. I've used the site many times to take apart Mac's I've needed to fix. But those instructions were iFixit prepared. They've now enabled anyone to build a teardown ("the act or process of disassembling") spec for any product. The site offers the structure and advice for building great teardowns. It then hosts and supports feedback. It is...

There's an interesting resistance (see the comments) to my resistance to Kevin Kelly's description of (what others call) Web 2.0 as "socialism." That resistance (to my resistance) convinces me my point hasn't been made.

Confidence about my "ignorance" about political philosophy notwithstanding (and don't tell my political philosophy tutor from Cambridge where I spent three years studying the stu...

As I wrote last week, I threw away a week I didn't have penning an "insanely long" review (as I described it), of Mark Helprin's insanely sloppy "Digital Barbarism."

The part of that book that really got me going was the incessant Red-baiting -- the suggestion that the movement of which I am a part is a kind of warmed over Marxism from the 1960s.

That part always gets me going because it betra...

Change Congress launched its second "good souls corruption" attack today, this time against Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson. (Two Dems in a row; we'll be more balanced next time.) The attack has excited an hysterical response from the Senator's office. Read about the charge (here) and the response (below), and then please sign our petition to Senator Nelson.

At the beginning of May, Senator Nelson w...

From the latest RIP!: A Remix Manifesto screening:

Sound Unseen in Minneapolis screens RIP!
Date May 28, 2009
Time 8:00 PM
Venue The TRYLON screening room
Location 2820 E 33rd St, Minneapolis, MN, 55406

Event Type Open to the Public
Ticket Price $5
Venue Capacity 60 (Small venue, buying tix in advance recommended!)
Event Website http://soundunseen.com
In RiP: A Remix Manifesto, web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.
The film's central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy?

"About as edgy and fascinating a glimpse you'll get of one of the more pressing issues of our Internet Age." .....Montreal Gazette.

Exactly two years ago today, the New York Times published an op-ed about copyright by a novelist. The piece caused something of a digital riot. As we learn now from his book, Digital Barbarism (HarperCollins 2009) (note: if you buy from that link, Creative Commons gets the referral fee), Mark Helprin was at the time completely ignorant about the hornet's nest he was about to kick. For him, the op-...

So I buy a Kindle book for my Kindle 2. It downloads to my machine. I open up the book -- it has no relation (except the relation of "not") to the book I ordered. Three emails, 4 days later, Amazon has still not responded to the problem. I wonder how they begin to discover/fix such a problem.

The great folks at American University have a great video about "fair use" and remix.

I still think lots about how to make obvious the obvious responsibility we all have to clean up your carbon. GreenWorldApps is developing a suite of web apps to make that easier.

The world of American copyright scholars is very familiar with the poetic passage of Jefferson's, written in a letter:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the p...

To get into law school, most require you take the LSAT. That test is administered by LSAC, a nonprofit corporation established to administer the tests.

But to get copies of the old tests to prepare for the exam, a student has got to purchase the tests through a test prep company -- a company that sells test preparation courses.

According to Steve Schwartz of the LSAT Blog, LSAC receives $194 f...

Markus Weiland has compiled an interesting comparison of the different terms of service for video hosting sites. You can read the report here.

New York, June 19-20, sponsored by the ISP at Yale Law School, and others.

In my work to push citizen funded elections (the hybrid between public funding (which is citizen funds) and small-donor contributions (citizen funding)), I have been astonished and deeply depressed by the number of very rich souls who in theory should support this change, but who resist it because, as I sense, they don't want to give up their own access to power.

These large Democratic Party cont...

So a bit sheepishly (as I'm in this film and really fat) (and I mean fat, not phat), let me push a favorite film by Brett Gaylor, RIP: A Remix Manifesto. The film is fantastic. Gillis (aka, GirlTalk) is amazing. And the technical execution (of course, the substance was a given for me) is extraordinary. If nothing else, remix the film (which you can at Brett's OpenSourceCinema).

You can go to ...

As I pleaded before, if you're a Wikipedian (and if you're not, you should be), and you've made more than 25 edits, then you are entitled to vote on whether Wikipedia should be relicensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (BY-SA).

If you are entitled, then please vote to make free culture interoperable. Voting ends May 3. That's like minutes from now.

Read more about i...

Creative Commons is hiring a software engineer after the amazing Asheesh Laroia is moving on to some very cool (and maybe secret so I won't say more) project out East. If you can code for good, we pay some. More information here. ...

The Bloomsbury Academic Press version of REMIX is now Creative Commons licensed (CC-BY-NC). You can download the book on the Bloomsbury Academic page....

As you may have read me tweet, the organization that hosted me for this talk:

Received a notice that Warner Music had objected to its being posted on copyright grounds. Apparently, YouTube's content-ID algorithm had found music in the video that they claimed ownership to. The organization is apparently responding by disputing the claim. I'll report back when I hear more.

Meanwhile, Keith Irw...