Last week, the American Film Institute has revealed its pick of the 100 best Hollywood movie quotes.

Due to licensing restrictions, there are no clips of the quotes on the AFI web site , nor will they be made available for purchase on DVD or VHS.

The nature of these licensing restrictions, and how else big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity is the topic of Free Culture by Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig. It details how over the last few decades, copyright law in the United States has been extended to a degree where it now gives enormous control over ideas and technology to media cartels, and how this could stifle innovation and result in a loss of culture and even free speech.

Lessig makes it quite clear that he does not intend to abolish copyrights, and he condemns piracy, but he also points out (and illustrates those points with depressing case studies) how the current system increasingly fails to provide access to content that is not commercially interesting, how it restricts derivative works, and how it cripples emerging technologies.

Being the chair of the Creative Commons project, Lessig also distributes Free Culture as a free download.

Five years ago, the American Film Institute announced the 100 funniest Hollywood movies. If you can spare the time and bandwidth, please celebrate the public domain by downloading the nineteenth funniest movie, His Girl Friday.

Not wanting to go on my stint as a freelancer totally unprepared, I ordered three consulting books from Amazon: Janet Ruhl's Answers for Computer Contractors, Mick Cope's Seven Cs of Consulting, and Gerald Weinberg's Secrets of Consulting. I came up with this selection after a quick search for recommendations on PerlMonks, and the three titles are quite different from each other.

Answers for Computer Contractors is a fact book and a compilation of contents from a web bulletin board and results of online surveys. Published in 1999, it is essentially a list of answers to practical questions (most of which probably only fully apply in the United States) and a lot of figures about the effect of location, age, experience, technologies, taxation and other factors on income distribution.

The Seven Cs (Client, Clarify, Create, Change, Confirm, Continue, Close) represent my worst fears of what a consulting book would look like, and it brought back terrible memories of the marketing and business administration courses I had to take at university. I immediately put it down. From the first to the last page, it is filled with totally illegible Dogbert-speak and matching diagrams.

But the third book, Gerald Weinberg's Secrets of Consulting turned out to be trove of wisdom, and an entertaining read at that. The fact that it is already twenty years old does no harm, as it concentrates on the general principles of giving (and taking) advice. Weinberg also knows the value of a good alliteration, as can be witnessed in the naming of his consulting laws and rules (such as Brown's Brilliant Bequest, Ford's Fundamental Feedback Formula, Pandora's Pox, the Trade-off Treatment, or the White Bread Warning).

On a related note, I was much relieved to find out that the world's foremost Oracle consultant is a redneck after hours.