It began like any other weekend. Just casually readin' the blogs. Then I stumbled on this post from AKMA wondering if anyone wanted to read and record a chapter of Lawrence Lessig's new book, Free Culture, which is available for free download under a Creative Commons license. 48 hours later, most of the book was available as MP3 downloads with just a few chapters left to be uploaded.
This week's first call is to AKMA, a prolific blogger, who by day is a priest teaching the New Testament at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. This wasn't how he planned to spend his weekend either.
Next I called the man himself, Larry Lessig. Was he prepared for this unintended consequence of publishing his book under a Creative Commons license? (Larry is one of the creators of the license.) Others have made books available for free download, but this may be the first time it's been supported by a major publisher.
Finally I spoke to Simon Carless who hosts Creative Commons licensed electronic music at LegalTorrents.com. (He uses the BitTorrent technology developed by Bram Cohen, whom we spoke with last week.) Simon also helps out at the Internet Archive (Archive.org) where a team has been working since 1996 to preserve digital media of all types: web sites, books, movies, music and more.
It's a single-theme show this week, so we haven't split the recordings. The whole thing is less than 17 minutes. Listen in.
This free podcast is from our Behind the Mic series.
