"For examples of materials with high merit and difficult rights status, Bruce Hartford of the American Civil Rights Movement website highlighted the sheer impossibility of determining rightsholders for many archival materials: internal documents created by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s are orphans because SNCC no longer exists. A photograph taken by an unknown prisoner in a Southern jail of another prisoner is an orphan because the copyright is held by the unknown prisoner who took the original photograph. In a similar vein, Rick Prelinger aired a color video, possibly shot by an employee of the War Relocation Authority, of the 1944 release of Japanese-Americans interned at the Jerome War Relocation Center in Arkansas.

This is a crucial point that is rarely noted: orphan status may be most common for materials generated on the margins of society — by people whose names and presence were never recorded, sometimes because of persecution; or by informal or transient organizations, groups, and movements that never had an opportunity to create their own legacy. For this content — which includes some of the most important artifacts that a society is likely to produce, documenting both its struggles and those who speak without a recorded voice — formal interventions are unlikely to make a meaningful difference because there is so little ownership data to work with. In these cases, Fair Use is often the appropriate apparatus."

"The BSI has already admitted it did not know why it was lobbying against the UK's open standards policy, only that is what it had been told to do by ISO in Geneva. ISO in turn says its policy is formed by constituents like BSI. Does anyone know what's going on? BSI's resident standards experts are from non-IT, engineering fields. It's public policy expert is a career standards wonk who cannot explain its software policy either.

It was no surprise this week therefore when ISO was also unable to give Computer Weekly any examples of when it's policy might be justified. That is, when it might be justified for a patent holder to make a claim on a software standard. Neither could BSI."

"Upon the close of the May 1 comment period, it is our intention to begin posting these 73 standards in HTML and begin the process of providing a unified, easy-to-use interface to all public safety standards in the Code of Federal Regulations. It is also our intention to continue this effort to include all standards specifically incorporated by reference in the 50 states. That the law must be available to citizens is a cardinal principle of law in countries such as India and the United Kingdom, and we will expand our efforts to include those jurisdictions as well."

"Libraries are a recognition that scholarship and culture are more than the business of creating and consuming. They are a human conversation, and libraries provide common ground where that conversation can take place and be remembered. By taking aim at the right for the public to maintain this conversation and its memory, publishers have shown us what we have to lose. It’s time we resisted the outsourcing of our common heritage by occupying the library."

"For my part, I started Brain Pickings more than six years ago as what’s commonly referred to as a “passion project” (though I don’t like the fleeting noncommittal relationship this phrasing suggests) and didn’t have a business model — but I did have a crystal-clear editorial model, which remains the same today: get people interested in meaningful cross-disciplinary things they didn’t yet know they were interested in, and in the process empower their networked knowledge and combinatorial creativity; break out of the filter bubble, if you will, though conceived long before we had the very vocabulary to articulate it. So when an aggregator like the Huffington Post, a business-model wolf wearing an editorial-authenticity sheep’s skin, takes my (ad-free) content and regurgitates it on its (ad-plastered) site, it lives up to the term “parasite” at the heart of Levine’s argument, derived from the Greek parasitos and used to describe “someone who ate at someone else’s table without providing anything in return.”"

"The tech world loves to bandy about the term “social,” but its concept of “social” seems to be based on what single twentysomethings do. “Social” in the sense of “families” is off the radar, as is “social” in the sense of “sharing.” It’s happy to make recommendations for individual purchases social, but shared purchases are verboten.

It’s shortsighted. If the demise of the music industry has taught us anything, it should be that walls don’t work. Sooner or later, demand will find a way around. The blistering success of itunes showed that there’s a substantial market for aboveboard, legal ways to allow people to get what they want; this isn’t just about piracy. But piracy may have to happen to make the literary version of itunes acceptable to publishers.

Put differently, the industry needs to learn to lean into change, rather than resisting it. I foresee a monster market for e-textbooks as soon as they offer something analogous to re-selling your used copies. Until then, the value proposition mostly isn’t there. (Yes, there are issues with disability access, but those strike me as solvable if the will is there.) Students will continue, quite rationally, to buy paper textbooks and re-sell them. "

"The theory of patent law is based on the idea that a lone genius can solve problems that stump the experts, and that the lone genius will do so only if properly incented. We deny patents on inventions that are "obvious" to ordinarily innovative scientists in the field. Our goal is to encourage extraordinary inventions – those that we wouldn’t expect to get without the incentive of a patent.

The canonical story of the lone genius inventor is largely a myth. Edison didn’t invent the light bulb; he found a bamboo fiber that worked better as a filament in the light bulb developed by Sawyer and Man, who in turn built on lighting work done by others. Bell filed for his telephone patent on the very same day as an independent inventor, Elisha Gray; the case ultimately went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which filled an entire volume of U.S. Reports resolving the question of whether Bell could have a patent despite the fact that he hadn’t actually gotten the invention to work at the time he filed. The Wright Brothers were the first to fly at Kitty Hawk, but their plane didn’t work very well, and was quickly surpassed by aircraft built by Glenn Curtis and others – planes that the Wrights delayed by over a decade with patent lawsuits.

The point can be made more general: surveys of hundreds of significant new technologies show that almost all of them are invented simultaneously or nearly simultaneously by two or more teams working independently of each other. Invention appears in significant part to be a social, not an individual, phenomenon. Inventors build on the work of those who came before, and new ideas are often "in the air," or result from changes in market demand or the availability of new or cheaper starting materials. And in the few circumstances where that is not true – where inventions truly are "singletons" – it is often because of an accident or error in the experiment rather than a conscious effort to invent. "

"Again, I do not know that the bloggers didn’t write the photographers to obtain commercial-use permission. But I doubt it. My judgement is borne from personal experience. I see my images popping up on commercial blogs all the time, and fewer than one in ten asks my permission.

I don’t mean to single out WIRED, either. I’m only picking on them for the recent ant example. In reality, many commercial blog networks show rampant disregard for the rights of artists, photographers, and musicians. They may not have been caught, yet, but they could incur substantial legal liability when a copyright owner decides to seek damages. After all, using an image beyond the bounds of the license is breaking the law.

The bottom line is this: if someone else’s creative work is helping you make money, you have a moral and a legal obligation to reach an agreement with that person about the terms of use. Creative Commons is supposed to make this easier, but it only works if the content consumers treat CC as a contract and not a blanket license for free use. Creative Commons is not public domain."

"I hate to imagine it, but this decision raises some frightening possibilities and requires greater vigilance on the part of librarians.  At the very least, libraries must demand information from publishers about where every item has been manufactured. Obtaining such information is no longer an option, since our legal uses of the things we buy now depends on knowing this, and the place where the publisher is located or where the sale took place is simply not sufficient.  But what I really fear is that publishers will begin to manufacture more of their works overseas and then try to demand a higher price – one that includes “public lending rights” – from libraries.

If libraries are in a difficult position, students may be even worse off under the Second Circuit’s ruling.  Again, publishers now have an incentive to manufacture their textbooks abroad and sell them to U.S. students.  Such students would no longer have the right to re-sell their textbooks or to purchase used texts.  The defendant in the case, Supap Kirtsaeng, had made a lucrative business out of reselling textbooks purchased in Asia.  He was perhaps an unsympathetic party, but what he was doing was not different in kind from the resale of texts that is common on all college campuses.  This activity makes higher education a little more possible for many.  Now publishers have an easy way for to close down this secondary market for textbooks, about which they have complained for years.  In the process, the cost of education for college students would be pushed up even further."

"The conclusion is as unpleasant as it is inevitable. The copyright industry lobby is actively trying to hide egregious crimes against children, obviously not because they care about the children, but because the resulting censorship mechanism can be a benefit to their business if they manage to broaden the censorship in the next stage. All this in defense of their lucrative monopoly that starves the public of culture."

"Culture is anti-rivalrous. The more people know and sing a song, the more cultural value it has. The more people watch my film Sita Sings the Blues, or read my comic strip Mimi & Eunice, the happier I’ll be, so please go do that now and then come back and read the rest of this paragraph. The more people know a movie or TV show, the more cultural value it has. Monty Python references attest to the cultural value of Monty Python – we even use the word “spam” because of it. Shakespeare‘s works are culturally valuable, and phrases from them live on in the language even apart from the plays (“I think she doth protest to much,” etc.). The more people refer to Monty Python and Shakespeare, the more you just gotta see em, amiright? Or not, it doesn’t matter whether you see them, you’re already speaking them. That all culture is a kind of language, I’ll leave for another discussion."

"Much of the modernization that Marx triumphed was a victory of profit-makers over rent-holders. What Hardt argues is that, as the economy becomes more and more about information, the crucial ends of capital holders is to take things that could belong to the commons and instead appropriate them as property rights and sell them off. The implies a prioritization of rent-holders over profit-makers in terms of power over the economy (also implying a regression back from the future that Marx thought would come after profit-makers – take that Hegelian Marxism!).

If we look at some of the major economic battles taking place, they are over patents, how the risks and rewards of large, systemically important public-utility style financial institutions are distributed and who gets to control the residual over the delegated ends of the government with the mad rush for the privatization of government resources and responsibilities. These are all, in some way, about rents. And the battle over these will determine a lot about who gains in the future of the economy.

As such, they are the only place where the financial sector and the real economy fight it out."

"Granting broadcasters and cablecasters intellectual property rights that apply independently of copyright in the programs being broadcast, together with legally enforceable technological protection measures, raises concerns for access to public domain works. These measures would add complexity to copyright clearance regimes for creators of podcasts and documentary films, and interfere with consumers’ ability to make home recordings permitted under national copyright laws. Granting broadcasters and cablecasters exclusive rights to authorize retransmissions of broadcasts over the Internet will harm competition and innovation by allowing broadcasters and cablecasters to control the types of devices that can receive transmissions. It will also create new liability risks for Internet intermediaries that retransmit information on the Internet."

"According to recent research, it is not illegal copying that is threatening the livelihood of artists, as record companies tell us, but an inequality built into the existing copyright system itself. Leonhard Dobusch on why, in a winner-takes-all culture, stronger copyright protection only benefits the few."

"Blogger and activist Cory Doctorow argues that all new media – from sheet music to cable TV – is accused of piracy by the mainstream ... until it becomes the mainstream"

"Copyright law’s grip on film, music and software barely touches the fashion industry … and fashion benefits in both innovation and sales, says Johanna Blakley. At TEDxUSC 2010, she talks about what all creative industries can learn from fashion’s free culture."

"You retain all ownership rights to Content uploaded to Twitpic. However, by submitting Content to Twitpic, you hereby grant Twitpic a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content in connection with the Service and Twitpic's (and its successors' and affiliates') business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels."

"Patent Publication Eliminates Trade Secret: In a straightforward opinion, the appellate panel held once published, the information in a patent application should be considered “generally known and readily available” and therefore are no longer amenable to trade secret protection.  "

"With Box, the customers are businesses for the most part. That is a key difference to other challenges by the RIAA. And It sets up a conflict between service providers and their clients who now face a determined media industry with a historic interest in litigation to protect its copyrights."

After 15 years of fighting the sharing of culture in the name of an obsolete copyright regime, governments of the World are uniting to control and censor the Internet. The black-out of the Egyptian Net, the US government’s reaction to Wikileaks, the adoption of website blocking mechanisms in Europe, or the plans for “Internet kill switches”[1] are all major threats on our freedom of expression and communication. These threats come from corporations and politicians, unsettled by the advent of the Internet.

The question, however, is whether that will happen anytime soon. And if it doesn't, music fans might be justified in putting the blame on copyright law. "The potential copyright liability that could attach to redistribution of these recordings is so large--and, more importantly, so uncertain--that there may never be a public distribution of the recordings," wrote David G. Post, a law professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, on the Volokh Conspiracy blog.

So despite most of the bill not applying to them, domain registers and registrars are now encouraged to simply take down sites on a voluntary basis, if they believe they're dedicated to infringement. And if they do so, they are immune from liability for damages caused. In other words, pretty much any domain can be disappeared by its register or registrar with little real recourse, and, in fact, there is encouragement for this to happen.

But the general agenda here is worth comment: like most of the other industry groups, BSA is very invested in proving that majorities of people approve of IP rights.  This feeds into a larger industry belief that, in the long term, the problem of piracy is one of cultivating respect for IP and, relatedly, demonstrating popular support for stronger enforcement measures.   Our view is that this notional ‘respect for IP’ is irrelevant in the face of (1) basic disconnects between high prices for media goods and low incomes, especially in developing countries, and (2) the ongoing rapid decline in the cost of digital technologies (that permit widespread copying, that need software, that facilitate music listening, and so on).

"SEI accuses FASB of acting like a monopoly. “Because FASB is a monopolist in the market for establishing financial accounting standards, their reliance on these terms constitutes a monopolistic position and restraint of trade,” said Narancic. “Relying on these terms, they’re effectively taking out a competitor, doing so unlawfully and based on unconscionable contract terms.”

The complaint acknowledges that FASB has been working with the International Accounting Standards Board on converging accounting standards and forming a global standard-setter, and that there are other groups involved in setting standards."

"Google and the USPTO have entered into an agreement to make the following USPTO products available to the public at no charge:

Patents (grants, applications, assignments, classification information, and maintenance fee events)
Trademarks (grants, applications, assignments, and TTAB proceedings)

All data originated from the USPTO. Google is hosting this data unchanged, except for repackaging into zip files."

"An interesting question to ask then is: how large would the public domain be if copyright had not been extended from its original length of 14 years with (possible) 14 year renewal (14+14) set out in Statute of Anne back in 1710? And how does this compare with how the situation, back when 14+14 was in “full swing”, say, 1795?"

"WHEN TEXT IS free to combine in new, surprising ways, new forms of value are created. Value for consumers searching for information, value for advertisers trying to share their messages with consumers searching for related topics, value for content creators who want an audience. And of course, value to the entity that serves as the middleman between all those different groups. This is in part what Jeff Jarvis has called the “link economy,” but as Jarvis has himself observed, it is not just a matter of links. What is crucial to this system is that text can be easily moved and re-contextualized and analyzed, sometimes by humans and sometimes by machines."

"Then they tested their model against reality: in a giant computing task, they took all the 15-nucleotide sequences from the BRCA1 gene, and searched for them, just on chromosome 1: they found 340,000 matches, roughly the same as their theoretical prediction, and the equivalent of 14 infringing sequences on every human gene. The BRCA1 gene, incidentally, is on chromosome 17.
The claims in this patent therefore extend, if properly enforced, to almost every single gene, in every single person on the planet. There is a moral and practical argument to be had about patenting nature, but the rights conferred in this patent are basically absurd."

"Copyright for Librarians is a joint project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL), a consortium of libraries from 50 countries in Africa, Asia and Europe. The goal of the project is to provide librarians in developing and transitional countries information concerning copyright law. More specifically, it aspires to inform librarians concerning:
copyright law in general
the aspects of copyright law that most affect libraries
how librarians in the future could most effectively participate in the processes by which copyright law is interpreted and shaped."

"Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself."

"Data Marketplace makes it easy for people to find, buy and sell data online.

Most data must be aggregated, cleaned, and analyzed to extract useful information. It doesn't make sense that the same person should do all of these things. Data Marketplace connects people who need data with people who are good at collecting, cleaning, and analyzing it.

People request data that they need. Providers upload data to Data Marketplace, provide descriptive metadata, and set a price. Stored metadata is used to help consumers find relevant data through traditional search engines and when browsing the marketplace."

"There's plenty to argue about here and he presents in black and white some issues that are full of grays, but chances are you won't spend 20 minutes today with a smarter person. It's worth watching and thinking about …"

"If a d.j. can thread together twenty different songs and package the end product as her own, why can’t a writer? This seems to be the question Hegemann is using as a defense. Original content, then, becomes subordinate to context, meaning that as long as a newer, larger work is being created, portions of prior works are fair game."

"I don't know about you, but for most of us "the best solution available in the market" is the one that costs the least and does what I want it to. If it's free, even better. Can we say "Google"?"

"The graph below shows examiner experience as grouped by technology center as of the end of FY2009."

"An end to frivolous patents for business processes will be a blessing to online commerce. Meanwhile, the loss of patent protection for software could make programmers realise at last that they have more in common with authors, artists, publishers and musicians than they ever had with molecular architects and chip designers. In short, they produce expressions of ideas that are eminently copyrightable."

"[W]hy didn't prints displace paintings the same way that printed books displaced manuscript codices? Why didn't it become expected that visual artists, like writers, would primarily produce works for reproduction?"

"Note that his findings regarding pricing is interesting: he dropped his prices, and is still selling the same number of games, just making half as much money."

"What does this mean to you?

If you currently receive Time Inc. or Forbes periodical content electronically from Gale or any provider other than EBSCO, you and your patrons will lose access to that content over the next year. While there will remain alternative, high-quality titles in all information providers' products, there will be an impact on users, especially those who access content through long-term statewide subscriptions."

"Hot on the heels of the story in Publisher's Weekly that "publishers could be losing out on as much $3 billion to online book piracy" comes a sudden realization of a much larger threat to the viability of the book industry. Apparently, over 2 billion books were "loaned" last year by a cabal of organizations found in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 Billion per year, losses which extend back to at least the year 2000. These lost sales dwarf the online piracy reported yesterday, and indeed, even the global book publishing business itself."

"I can understand why a retailer would want to use my copyright as bait to lock in readers—but exactly how is this good for me? This is why I'm not selling digital downloads of the professional readings of With a Little Help. With so much friction and goofiness in the marketplace, I'd rather give the MP3s away under a Creative Commons license and solicit donations through PayPal. My listeners don't want DRM. They want to get their books with a minimum of hassle. But, for the record, I'd put my books in Audible and the iTunes Store in a hot second if only they'd sell them on the same terms that I'd be willing to buy them: no DRM and no license agreement except “don't violate copyright law.”"

"We’re still in shock asking why Microsoft would even stoop to this level of wilfully plagiarising a young and innovative upstart’s work rather than reach out to us or innovate on their own terms. Of course, it just hits that much closer to home when all your years of hard work and effort to create something unique are stolen so brazenly. All the more ironic considering Microsoft has often been leading the charge on fighting for stronger IP laws and combating software piracy in China."

"I mean, we all know that major labels are supposed to be venal masters of hiding money from artists, but they’re also supposed to be good at it, right? This figure wasn’t insulting because it was so small, it was insulting because it was so stupid."

"Inventors and practitioners will need to take these developments into account when preparing and prosecuting applications. For example, it may be necessary to review a broader cross-section of prior art than was previously necessary, or to consider filing evidence of unexpected results earlier rather than later in the course of prosecution. By being proactive, practitioners will expedite prosecution and avoid unnecessary fees and RCE filings. "

"Extensive research has been done to analyze the phenomenon of open source software development from various perspectives. By contrast little is known about open source development of tangible objects, so–called open design, so far. Until recently, limitations to the availability of successful empirical examples of this ‘new innovation model’ outside software may have been a key reason for this gap.

This paper contributes to the literature on the open source mode of product development by providing a quantitative study (N = 85) of open design projects. Our goal is to explore the landscape of open source development in the world of atoms, to analyze project characteristics, structures, and success, and to investigate similarities and dissimilarities to open source software development."

"An even more striking thing, perhaps, emerges in this second graph, namely that revenues accrued by artists themselves have in fact risen over the past 5 years, despite the fall in record sales. (All the blue bars in the chart above represent revenues that go directly to artists. As you can see, the ‘blue total’ has risen noticeably.) This is mostly because of live revenues, but also because of the growing amount collected by the PRS on behalf of artists, which accounts for a much bigger chunk of industry revenues than most people realise."

"The MPAA has successfully shut down an entire town's municipal WiFi because a single user was found to be downloading a copyrighted movie. Rather than being embarrassed by this gross example of collective punishment (a practice outlawed in the Geneva conventions) against Coshocton, OH, the MPAA's spokeslizard took the opportunity to cry poor (even though the studios are bringing in record box-office and aftermarket receipts)."

"The Chamber has pulled out all the stops in its effort to silence the activists. First, it sent an improper copyright takedown notice to the Yes Men's upstream provider, demanding that a parody website posted in support of the action be removed immediately and resulting in the temporary shutdown of not only the spoof site but hundreds of other sites hosted by May First/People Link. Next, the Chamber filed suit against the activists in federal court, claiming among other things the activism infringed their trademarks."

"Riddle me this, Batman: If you put Linux on your Windows XP computer, is it now a new computer, a new machine? Take a look. Nope. Same old dent on the bottom, same stickers next to the keyboard. Latch is loose. Duh. Same machine."

"On Monday, November 9, 2009, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in In re Bilski, and two CLE providers plan to offer same day or next day coverage of the proceedings."

"This is a degree of uncertainty that can't be fixed by changes in evaluation standards.

As for innovation, lists and lists of research suggests that patents reduce software innovation.

There was a time when if you wrote something, you owned it, you could sell it, you could give it away. It could be put in the accounts and it could be used as the base for collaboration. Now, ownership of a piece of software is hopeful speculation. There is no reliable way to have a settled expectation regarding the boundaries or the extent to which you own a piece of software. This uncertainty, and this unfair regulation is what the Supreme Court has the chance to rid us of by giving the USPTO a reliable tool for excluding software ideas from patentable subject matter."

"His startup recently got sued for patent infringement by a company that independently developed a product that performs a vaguely similar function. This other company's product is much less sophisticated, and their user-facing site is an ugly, user-hostile pile of crap. The term "search arbitrage" would be a kind word to apply to this other company's product. And there is absolutely no sense in which my friend's work builds on any of this other company's technology.

Now, my friend and his partner have consulted multiple IP lawyers and they've said, "Yep, the law is probably on your side." They have also said, "You're still screwed." The trial would take forever, the legal fees would be ruinous, and in the meantime nobody will invest in a company which has a litigation cloud hanging over it."

"Well, those copyright assertions are back, this time by the Attorney General, who asserted ownership over the (for real!) Attorney General's Public Record and Public Meeting Manual. I spent last week in Oregon meeting with law school faculty and giving lectures at 3 universities on the topic of who owns the law."

"Where we are now, and we already know that we are there, is in a much more permeable and fluid society and a much more permeable cultural environment where the difference between producers and consumers is much more blurred. Where this category of users has become absolutely central to everything we do. So when we talk about newspapers, we have to think about the users who communicate with a commercial organization like TPM, the users who basically get together and make their own new party presses, like DailyKos or Townhall, like the users who make up YouTube, like the users who make up Wikipedia. Suddenly you have radically decentralized practical capacity to act. And what do people do? They act."

"In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is the broadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is the transmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formula goes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a student, you're an empty vessel and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you."... The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either."

"If there is no signed written agreement, then the work isn’t for hire, and you start out with all the rights. If there is a written agreement, it should be entered into before you create the work. Beware of after-the-fact attempts to take away your rights by calling the work “for hire,” for example by sending you a check whose endorsement line says that your signature is your agreement that the work was for hire."

"I saw today on the blog of Lauren Nassef, one of my favorite illustrators, a post alerting people to a woman by the name of Samantha Beeston, whose online portfolio was comprised almost entirely of work traced/copied from Nassef. In July 2009 Beeston even won an award (which included a cash prize of £750) for work blatantly traced/copied from drawings by Nassef."

"I love it. The AP realizes it’s made a mistake trying to assert copyright over words it didn’t write and doesn’t own, but it can’t even bring itself to admit it. No, they’re saying they’ve “revoked” the license, as though it were their choice whether to allow me to quote Jefferson in the first place. How about this, AP? Why don’t you buy a “license” from me that allows you not to be such dunderheads when it comes to copyright? I’m willing to give it to you for free if you’re interested—but somehow I don’t think you are."

"Judging by the quality of much of the popular press, most of what gets published these days doesn't get edited in any meaningful way. Some of that is probably the fruit of cost cuts over the years, but I worry that some of it is a loss of the sense that it's supposed to happen at all."

"This curriculum is designed to give teachers a comprehensive set of tools to educate students about copyright while incorporating activities that exercise a variety of learning skills. Lesson topics include: the history of copyright law; the relationship between copyright and innovation; fair use and its relationship to remix culture; peer-to-peer file sharing; and the interests of the stakeholders that ultimately affect how copyright is interpreted by copyright owners, consumers, courts, lawmakers, and technology innovators."

"The RIAA doesn’t stop at manipulating copyright law to gouge artists and the public. They also use their lawsuits as leverage to argue for control over any technology that could be used to distribute music. For example, they have pushed to require all wireless access points to be encrypted and closed, to restrict technologies like BitTorrent and other forms of peer-to-peer distribution, to impose bandwidth caps on home internet users, and to monitor traffic through service providers. Such efforts directly hurt free software. Because free software authors around the world work by collaboration, they rely on open distribution networks to move software, data, and conversation around. In particular, peer-to-peer technologies make this easier and cheaper for people with less bandwidth, and so are a powerful means of boosting grassroots free software distribution and development efforts."

"RiP: A remix manifesto is a documentary film about copyright and remix culture. You can contribute to the film, and follow the conversation on the social networks below."

"EPO's president, Alison Brimelow, has been quoted as saying: "Huge backlogs change the nature of the patenting system and create ambiguities which can be exploited in ways unforeseen by those who established the patent system."

In response, the European Union has funded a project called PATExpert which uses semantic web technology. PATExpert is a multimedia content representation system for the retrieval, classification and generation of concise parent information. The system supports multiple languages and provides tools to assess patent material. The system has been demonstrated and the probable next step is commercialization for general use."

"In the short run, the Google Book Search settlement will unquestionably bring about greater access to books collected by major research libraries over the years. But it is very worrisome that this agreement, which was negotiated in secret by Google and a few lawyers working for the Authors Guild and AAP (who will, by the way, get up to $45.5 million in fees for their work on the settlement—more than all of the authors combined!), will create two complementary monopolies with exclusive rights over a research corpus of this magnitude. Monopolies are prone to engage in many abuses.
The Book Search agreement is not really a settlement of a dispute over whether scanning books to index them is fair use. It is a major restructuring of the book industry’s future without meaningful government oversight. The market for digitized orphan books could be competitive, but will not be if this settlement is approved as is."

"The US public domain is filled with creative works you can use any way you want to. No need to ask anyone’s permission. No fees necessary.

You can find photos, books, music, software — and more — that you’re free to recast, remix, and build upon. But how do you find these works? And how can you be sure they really are copyright-free?

Copyright law is complex (as complex as the tax code, some say) and there’s a lot of misinformation and hype out there about what is and what isn’t “public domain.” It can get confusing."

Actually quite a bit of interesting meta-info here

"The best thing about raw data is that almost everyone knows how it works. This means that as far as the data (re)user is concerned, the datasets are text files (or perhaps a close variant) that they can download, open in some default application, and get some immediate use out of it."

"Lenders are offered returns based on a rolling six-month average so dud projects will be offset by sales of profitable ones. It takes just a few deals to strike it big, Huynh and Stack say, and because it is a community that is not just passionate but also knowledgeable, better projects are likely to get funded.

The promise of returns is enough to get former investment banker Andrew de Montille excited.

"I put money in the bank not because I consider it as a charitable investment," says de Montille. "Rather, I am very confident that some of the projects will do well enough to be profitable to the investors.""

"... Yet, it seems like other parts of the movie industry are having a lot of trouble understanding this, as recent efforts around the globe have forced the closure of a number of fansub sites -- even ones that don't provide the actual movies to download at all, just the subtitles. Yet movie studios an the courts are ruling that just creating translated subtitles is infringing. In one case, it appears that a site was shut down just for linking to such an "unauthorized subtitles.""

"Standards create opportunities to do stuff. These opportunities may well be patent worthy. So if you want to grow out the thicket around the emerging standard you just lock some smart guys in a room and start them brain storming. Some of what they come up with will be obvious, but that hardly means you won’t be able to capture a patent for it. Just to add to fire to the shit storm it appears that Redhat’s patent is for the mind bogglingly obvious idea of transfering XML data over AMQP. Of course any patent worth it’s lawyering starts with some broad claim and then get’s more focused."

"The trade associations argue instead that “alternative means for achieving the desired use should first be pursued including seeking permission from the rights holder.” This is wrong — a non-infringing use is one where prior authorization from the rights holder is not necessary. Reminder: fair use is an unauthorized use. If you are asking permission, then you are not exercising your lawful exception."

"Open Everything is a global conversation about the art, science and spirit of 'open'. It gathers people using openness to create and improve software, education, media, philanthropy, architecture, neighbourhoods, workplaces and the society we live in: everything. It's about thinking, doing and being open."

"Call to Action: We therefore urge every U.S. law school to commit to ending print publication of its journals and to making definitive versions of journals and other scholarship produced at the school immediately available upon publication in stable, open, digital formats, rather than in print."

"It's time for OCLC to recognize they made this mess, not others. They have perpetrated some astouding missteps—from attempting to sneak through a major rewrite of the core member policy in a few days without consultation, to a comic series of rewrites and policy reversals, culminating in withdrawing the policy entirely for discussion. (It now seems clear they did so on the heels of a member revolt, whether general or just of some key libraries.)"

"There's also an unspoken class bias at work here, a bully mentality that chooses its targets based on who's likely to fight back and win. Consider commercial TV, which is filled with programs that routinely air copyrighted material without permission for purposes of journalism, satire or simple entertainment. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report don't ask permission to air any of the news clips they slice and dice each night for yuks; they consider a network's onscreen logo to be acknowledgment enough, and their assumption is almost never challenged."

"Even more exciting, however, is that Ghosts I-IV is ranked the best selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon’s MP3 store.

Take a moment and think about that."

"There is increasing concern about the disappearance of technical knowledge from the public domain, both on grounds that is presents a security danger and because it is economically valuable "Intellectual Property". I argue that this development is not anomalous at all but a great historic trend tied to our transition to the information age. We are in the process of losing a human right that all of us thought we had but actually didn't--the right to learn things we can and better ourselves economically from what we learn. Increasingly, figuring things our for yourself will become theft and terrorism. Increasingly, reason itself will become a crime."