My basic principle of integrity is an isotope of Larry Lessig’s:

Anything I say represents the views of at most one person: me.

Filthy Lucre

I make money in a few ways. None of them involve pipers who call the tune, and I don’t tailor what I say to make it more salable.

I have a day job. I’m a law professor. That means that New York Law School pays me to teach classes and to write scholarship. Like other serious educational institutions, NYLS is committed to academic freedom. No one at the school has ever pressured me to take any particular viewpoint in my work and I’m confident no one ever will.

Being an academic also frees me from having to hustle to put food on the table. Since I never need the money from outside writing or speaking work, I never have to swallow my principles to land a gig. I’ve walked away from paid writing offers that clashed with my views on free culture (see below).

I write purely because my own agitation or amusement compels me to. Now and then, I place an essay somewhere that pays. The sums have never been princely; if I were writing for the money, I’d be an even bigger fool than I look. I treat it as a windfall: a fortunate side effect of the greater fortune of getting an essay into a publication where my ideas might have some influence on a wider audience.

I sometimes speak at conferences and other events. Even when I’ve been invited to address a particular subject, I’ve never been asked to take a particular position. My research budget only goes so far, so I ask for reimbursement for my actual travel expenses where possible. I also accept honoraria from private-sector hosts.

Some years ago, I worked as a programmer for Microsoft. (Also, the academic institute from which I held a fellowship in 2006-07—though not the fellowship itself—was funded in part by Microsoft.) My stock options have long since expired, unexercised and underwater. Longtime Laboratorium readers know that I’ve both praised and criticized the company, and I’ll continue to do so as appropriate.

Blogistry

This blog is structurally independent. There are no business relationships that influence on what appears on it.

Editors: I’m the only person with the password to the blog. No one else directs me to say or not to say things on it.

New York Law School: I don’t use school computing resources to maintain the blog and I don’t pay its costs with school funds.

Internet intermediaries: The blog lives on a server administered cooperatively by a group of my friends. It’s hosted on a colocated box at RimuHosting. My DNS is handled by Gandi. I do almost all of my own programming and HTML design; I get informal unpaid help from friends for some of the sysadmin tasks.

Commercial pressure: I pay the hosting, domain registration, and other costs out of my own pocket. I don’t accept advertising, commissions, sponsorships, link exchanges, or what-have-you. For some people, blogging costs (including time and effort) would pose a real hardship if they didn’t take ads. As a a legal academic, I have both the means to subsidize my blogging and a higher obligation to be independent.

Free Culture

Wherever possible, I make my writings freely available under a highly permissive Creative Commons license. The academic publish-or-perish imperative means that sometimes I’ve been forced to agree to more restrictive terms. I’ve assigned the copyrights in some of my non-academic writings, when I felt the good of reaching a wider audience outweighed the harm of restricting access.

I host most of my academic writings for free anonymous download at SSRN and BePress. I self-host my syllabi, slides, and other course materials. I use universally accessible formats when distributing my work: principally PDF, HTML, XML, Atom, and Markdown.

Miscellany

I have strong views on many issues. These do not require special disclosure here; the point of this blog and my writings is precisely for me to disclose them, as persuasively as I can. I regularly exercise my fair use rights under copyright law, my experimental use rights under patent law, and my noncommercial (and parodic, fair, etc.) use rights under trademark law.

I use both proprietary and free software, depending on the task and the available options. I’ve contributed to both sorts of projects. I use any number of web services, including Flickr, Gmail, and Facebook. I’m a Mac owner with a strong fanboy streak, and yes, I have an iPhone.