Copyright
Gowers – IP a priesthood and a playground
From The future of intellectual property: Andrew Gowers interviewed on openDemocracy.net: The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property has been broadly welcomed by copyright campaigners. Lawrence Lessig, the godfather of Creative Commons, has labelled research conducted into the economics of copyright extension “fantastic”, urging all governments to “muster the courage to follow this advice”; the Open […]
Pirates or just small-time criminals?
Peter Black, an associate lecturer in law at the Queensland University of Technology, hosts this month’s Blawg Review on his Freedom To Differ blog, which focuses on the legal regulation of the internet and the media, providing an extensive selection of great links for the IP/media lawyer in particular. One that caught my eye was […]
Where culture comes from
I can’t do better than quote verbatim from Jack Schofield in the Guardian Technology Blog: Over at Slate, Paul Collins makes the reasonable point that lots of examples of plagiarism may well come to light as more old works are digitised for Google Book Search. I should hope so! What he doesn’t point out is […]
Elvis is not going to produce any more recordings
In response to the proposed extension of UK copyright for recordings from 50 years to 95 years, Lawrence Lessig blogs on quantifying the value of the public domain pointing to this like-named paper by Rufus Pollock. He also refers indirectly to an article by Eric Flint for Jim Baen’s Universe Copyright: How Long Should It […]
RSS and the law
Kevin O’Keefe recently posted a thought-provoking piece on the Law on using others’ RSS feeds, garnered from an article at EContent: RSS: Use, Lose, or Abuse?. The strict position (in US law, but little different here), as stated by Peter Strand, partner of the US law firm Holland & Knight, is that: In general, the […]
Free Culture
I’ve just ordered a nice print edition of Larry Lessig’s Free Culture – per one reviewer (and my snatches of it confirm this) – a “focused, measured argument of the issues around preserving and extending digital creativity”. Many feel it’s cool to cite his blog in their blogrolls. I don’t find that compelling reading; on […]
Sincere flattery or blatant affrontery?
Copy theft is rife on the web. There’s so much of it, you have to be selective about what you lose sleep over. Let’s leave aside substantial, deliberate infringements for the time being and look at the lazy copier. You know the type: Wish I’d written that page/constructed that set of links. I’ll just grab […]
Intellectual Property: Enforcement Directive
The European Parliament has voted to approve the controversial Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive by a vote of 330 to 151. While the law was originally drawn up to target professional pirates, criminals and counterfeiters who make copies of goods such as football shirts or CDs, the directive was later expanded to cover any infringement […]
