Yeah, yay. This really is so awesome. I'd seriously consider going and working for him.
Rumor has it that his final exam for Con Law consists of twenty multiple choice questions, all of which are a statement followed by "A) True, B) False, C) Maybe".
Besides, Creative Commons is wacky.
Creative Commons is great. Intellectual property is conceptually retarded, but might as well fix it where we can.
Why are there rumors about his final exam? Do people not make it out alive?
Does he have any chance? I only know of him through the computer industry, so I'm assuming that this has the same base plausibility of Richard Stallman running for Congress.
Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I posted this here last night.
Jackie Speier, who apparently has significant establishment backing, is also running in the Dem primary, which it turns out is coming up on 4/8. One wonders whether he has a chance, given that.
What is the Obama change typeface anyway? Did he co-opt it directly or mimic it? It looks like Arial meets Bauhaus.
Gotham? No shit? Damn. We used Gotham at a newsrag I edited at college. I'm completely discredited.
Saving grace: we used Minion, too. Bless thee, Minion!
'Change Congress' can borrow a basement full of CC (ex Creative Commons) logo swag. Or license it for cheap.
Larry would be more sufferable than most congress critters.
Wait, this guy clerked for Scalia? But now he's all "Obama yay (some) regulation of commerce"? Wikipedia says so. Someone point me to a more complete bio, porfa?
Scalia frequently hires clerks who are ideologically opposed to him.
The presentation method in that video is pretty stultifying. It's as if the Spirit of PowerPoint took weed and decided it needed to "get all Web 2.0 up ins."
Oh, man, I so agree with 20. Lessig for Congrezzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Someone hire this man a speechwriter.
I went to high school with one of the guys who designed Gotham -- Jonathan Ho/efler. Lovely guy. Very very peculiar.
Trivia: The Gotham typeface was created by Sasha Frere-Jones' brother, Tobias.
I am surprised to learn that the Port Authority Bus Terminal font is not actually a "designed" font. It's quite striking.
I saw an earlier use of that video/powerpoint technique in a keynote he gave in 2003 or so. It's good stuff, even in person.
23, 24: I could be wrong -- they're partners, but come to think of it I don't know that Jonathan had anything to do with Gotham, I just noticed that it was his firm.
Gov. George E. Pataki said in his Fourth of July cornerstone speech that the 20-ton block came from the Adirondacks, "the bedrock of our state." He did not note that its 26 words were set in a typeface steeped in local origin, developed four years ago at the Hoefler Type Foundry in the Cable Building, at Broadway and Houston Street, by Tobias Frere-Jones, a native New Yorker.The typeface, Gotham, deliberately evokes the blocky, no-nonsense, unselfconscious architectural lettering that dominated the streetscape from the 1930's through the 1960's in building names, neon signs, hand-lettered advertisements and lithographed posters.
Its chief inspiration, in fact, were the letters spelling out PORT AUTHORITY BUS TERMINAL over the terminal's Eighth Avenue doors. So the circle comes to a close, since the trade center site is owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Google can do anything.
18: Scalia does sometimes (supposedly regularly) hire a liberal clerk, and no doubt Lessig fit that slot. But when you read his account of just how free from politics Scalia's judging is, you've got to wonder what they were putting in the Kool-Aid in chambers. (Bonus hilarious prediction in that piece that the then-imminent Bush v. Gore would be similarly constrained by the rule of law!) Also: clerked for Posner.
My sense of Lessig is that he's quite good on IP, but substantially weaker on privacy issues, in which he is (or was, haven't read him in a few years) too sanguine about market solutions.
Wikipedia makes it sound like Lessig had something of a liberal awakening at some point.
Lessig's view of the Court (and maybe of the law) changed significantly after he argued Eldred v. Ashcroft, the copyright extension case, and failed to move the conservative Justices at all. And I think his later involvement in the copyright movement has tended to make him more liberal generally, at least for a value of liberal that includes "distrustful of coporations."
He has an article on Eldred here, though in it he tends to blame himself more than the Justices.