NEW YEAR, NEW WORLD CULTURE

Lawrence Lessig to appear in Second Life to discuss his latest book in mid-January...

This holiday's NWN reading assignment is Free Culture, available in bookstores and for free download in various forms at the official site-- the latest book by the monumentally influential Stanford legal theorist and expert on IP rights in the Internet age. Rather than get into the details now-- which are still being hammered out, in any case-- let's just say Lessig is coming soon in avatar form. (Like Cory Doctorow, Thomas P.M. Barnett, and Ellen Ullman before him.) When the where and the when of the event are set, I'll post that info here. If you'd like to volunteer to help in any way, let me know.

Let's also say the man who brought this together and deserves the credit is longtime Resident Eggy Lippman. (And I do mean longtime-- he's been around long enough to show up at 6am SLT during my "Day in the Life of Second Life" 24 hour marathon posted exactly two years ago.)

"I didn't do anything special," he tells me modestly, "all I had to do was ask and he said 'of course'." A student of Lessig's was researching Second Life history and wound up e-mailing Eggy, who has created an excellent wiki on that very subject. In the course of trying to interview him, Eggy brought up the idea of Lessig getting the interview treatment himself, and with that, and Lessig's cheerful assent, here we are.

Eggy now makes much of his real life income as an expert scripter in Second Life, so it's actually perfect that he's the one to bring Second Life and Lawrence Lessig together again. For as it happens, Eggy's in-world career (like all the other builders and coders who've also made their in-world creativity their occupation) was enabled Lessig himself, when he advised Linden Lab to recognize the IP rights over the content their Residents created.

But then, since I'm sure that'll be a main point of conversation when he arrives, that's getting ahead of ourselves. For now, circle the second-through-fourth weekend of January, start reading, and watch this blog for news on the good professor's appearance into the world, where he'll meet the Residents whose lives he altered by his intercession, like a deus machinima that changes the fundamental laws of the universe for the better.

When he meets, that is to say, the children of a Lessig god.