Alex Macgillivray, Glenn Brown and I did a presentation with Charlie Nesson on Content: Technology at the Stanford ILAW. We discussed what the Internet changes about the creation, distribution, and use of "content," focusing on peer-to-peer architectures and sampling.

Glenn showed some of the music and video sampling that Creative Commons licenses can facilitate; Alex suggested that Google can be seen as web-wide sampling. I showed examples of "cultural sampling" -- creative use and abuse of trademarks and copyrights -- and the legal threats they often receive, as collected by Chilling Effects. In many cases, though, lawyers' threats don't produce the desired capitulation, but a swarm of web protest instead. In those cases, I asked, who gets the 'Net? The corporations and politicians using cease-and-desists, or those using the 'Net to respond? Chilling Effects aims to empower the responders.

Slides from Who gets the 'Net? presentation viewable online.