This is the real deal. I’ve got an in print O’Reilly book of your choice for you if you win. Leave your braindroppings below (and a contact method) and I’ll post back here periodically with some of the best. I’ll close this out in a month from today. Hope we have a deserving winner.

After you’ve had the experience of hearing Lawrence Lessig speak (or reading the transcripts) a few times and you grasp some, if not all, of the issues involved with the encroachment of the commons and the threat to creative freedoms that come from ever expanding copyrights and increasing thursts for control of intellectual work, you and I are confronted with an underlying challenge aside from doing something about it. Explaining it in under three seconds! Yikes!

Read the transcipt first. Then contemplate this quote:

In an interview two days ago, Watts said, Here’s the problem with Washington: “If you are explaining, you are losing.” If you are explaining, you’re losing. It’s a bumper sticker culture. People have to get it like that, and if they don’t, if it takes three seconds to make them understand, you’re off their radar screen. Three seconds to understand, or you lose. This is our problem.

The very least we can do is explain this to others. But how? There are a lot of issues, examples, and characters in this story. So we need something, a quick ‘tag line’ that is easy enough for t-shirts, bumpersticks, and laptop stickers. I hate it as much as you do, but that’s how life is. You need a little something that hooks someone’s attention so they are interested enough to want further discussion.

Can you do it? Let’s kick them around & see what we can come up with.

Let me start with something from Mr. Lessig’s book The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World from the second to last paragraph of chapter 10. “Dinosaurs should die.” I’m quite sure you can all do better….

C’mon, put you onboard motor to work!