It's good to be a nerd. At least that's how SFist feels after hanging out at the Swedish American Hall, taking full advantage of the open bar, nodding our head to the DJ's beats, nibbling on tidbits from the trays of finger food and stuffing our bag with schwag at the Creative Commons party last night. Intellectual property lawyers sure know how to party!

Lawrence Lessig, everyone's favorite copyright law reform advocate and Stanford law professor, got in some great jabs at Bill Gates, who had basically called copylefters 'communists' on Wednesday (some of us take that as a compliment, Bill). You can get a torrent of the video at Prodigem (link via BoingBoing).

What intrigued us was the "Fine Art of Sampling" contest at CCMixter (described as 'Friendster for samplers') -- sample some tracks from Wired Magazine's "Rip. Mix. Burn." CD, create something new from it, and if you're track is picked as one of the eleven for a new CD, you get a pair of passes to attend M3: Miami Music and Multimedia, where you can listen to Mr. Lessig deliver the keynote address.

It was nice to meet some new folks like Peter Kai Chang and Matt Mullenweg, and to catch up with some friends of SFist, including Min Jung Kim, Jeff Veen, Kevin Smokler, and Heather Champ. And Kevin was nice enough to introduce us to one of our heroes, Annalee Newitz, who works for the Electronic Frontiers Foundation when she isn't writing her Techsploitation column or editing Other Mag with Charlie Anders. We also managed to get thisclose to Matt Haughey and Dan Gillmor, but didn't get a chance to chat. We'll harass them next time.

Photo by Peter Kai Chang.