Interesting approach: massively distribute the catalogue so that it can’t easily be taken down.

‘Whether a player buys or pirates a game depends on how much each service - not product! - “costs” in terms of these four currencies, as well as how much the player values each one.’

‘But […] there’s another way to think about copyright: as a regulation of commercial exploitation, rather than a regulation of copying per se.’

Collection societies do seem very much like a tidy scam.

‘And then you can wonder why people will continue to BitTorrent your TV shows even in places where they’re broadcast free-to-air, and your movies even when they already own copies of them.’

‘Free and pirated content is available regardless of whether the encoding is done by us or not’

Charles Stross shows a very good understanding of the ebook scene.

What it can and can’t detect.

Really good summary.

‘If “others profiting from my work” is something you seek to avoid, then Free Software is not for you.’ Mark Pilgrim responds in a principled manner to his work being legally commercially exploited by someone else.

That's what I call piracy. Disney doesn't own Snow White. It's an old European folk tale collected and edited in the mid 19th century.

‘Thus, the doctrine of intellectual property is extremely impractical. It grants people property rights which are unlimited in their distribution, and which extend over things in other peoples' homes, e.g., their computers, their paper, and whatever other materials might be used to encode an idea.’

The case that established that simple collections of facts are not copyrightable under US law.

The case that established that simple reproductions of public domain works cannot be copyrighted in the US.

The report proposes ‘to turn [...] infrastructure over to the selfish mismanagement of special interests who want to be sure that their buggies won't be crowded off the digital byways.’

Also complains about ‘this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time.’ Hilarious.

‘Your Fonts are superior to Our Fonts in every conceivable way, except one: WE CAN’T FUCKING USE THEM’. I’m sympathetic to both viewpoints. Fonts you can’t use are useless, but releasing them for embedding means making them available to the world.

Half mast pirate flag to sympathise with the Pirate Bay chaps. I find it odd that they choose to claim copyright and licensing so prominently.

‘Giuseppe Verdi composed in an era both without copyright and with copyright – but as soon as copyright came into play, he drastically slowed down his production of new works, since he could live off the royalties from older works instead.’

YouTube? TheyTube, more like. Copyright destroys another Alexandrian library.

Is anyone surprised?

‘You might just as well say sportspeople have a moral case to a pension at 30.’ Gowers kicks Burnham’s arse.

Most copied game is the one with the most objectionable DRM. That’s not ironic, it’s to be expected.

Firefox add-on ‘integrates a new “download 4 free” button into the Amazon product page when the same article is also available via The Pirate Bay.’

Sensible WSJ article by Lawence Lessig on how the law hasn’t caught up with technology when it comes to copyright.

Knowledge is still not free. A manifesto to release it regardless of the fact that the law has not yet caught up.

A list of profs as long as your arm comes out against Sir Cliff’s pension boondoggle.

Seem LV is run by people every bit as distasteful as their customers.

‘What I do is hack into restricted websites, download the documents I'm interested in, and […] remove the copyright statements from each page. Next I […] upload [them] to the Internet Archive[.]’

'But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. "That was the moment we realised the game was completely up."'

Really interesting technical details that explain how tv-links managed to keep the videos online, and why this is a little more complex than just linking to infringing content.

Research into the likelihood of P2P activity being tracked by The Man.

I think the word they’re looking for is ‘pwned’.

DRM’s bad for business.

The official BitTorrent site won't list unlicensed copies of movies any longer. The Pirate Bay, on the other hand, will.

The saga of Sony versus its customers.

Oh yeah? Well, so is paying for CDs.