brainwagon

The National Endowment for the Humanities is teaming with the Library of Congress to make 30 million newpaper pages from 1836 to 1922 available for free download over the net. Interestingly: The span of the joint project is limited because type faces of printers used before 1836 are too difficult for optical scanners to read, […]

Over the weekend I heard a talk by Mike Godwin of Public Knowledge about the state of intellectual property law. The lame duck Senate is currently poised to consider Public Knowledge – The Intellectual Property Protection Act (H.R. 2391), a draconian mix of copyright legislation which would abolish many fair use protections and extend criminal […]

Cory Doctorow gives a nice talk to a bunch of librarians, and somebody was kind enough to record. transcribe and post the Quicktime.

This morning Neda Ulaby of NPR reported on Political Speeches and the Public Domain, which covers a dilemma. Public speeches by politicians are normally considered to be in the public domain, but news networks recording such events often copyright their own recordings of these events, causing enormous difficulties for historians, students, and independent film makers […]

Wired is running this interview with a lawyer for Tivo regarding their new changes to respect broadcast flags for pay-per-view content. While it’s bad news for consumers, I think it is refreshing to hear a lawyer speak this candidly. Best exchange: WIRED: TiVo has always been about empowering the viewer. Why change now? ZINN: Macrovision […]

Awesome! Undeadart.org (a division of FreeCulture) is having a contest to remix clips from classic zombie flicks! What an awesome idea! Since the public domain includes the classic Night of the Living Dead, one imagines that you could do a fairly good job of it. They also include a link to the movie Amid the […]

Materials licensed under Creative Commons licenses are becoming more and more popular, and more and more mainstream. As reported on BoingBoing, Knitty is a web-published knitting magazine, and for a special breast-cancer awareness issue, they decided to publish their patterns under a Creative Commons license, specifically the Attribution-NoCommercial-NoDerivs license. Check out the patterns: I’m more […]

In the realm of patents being issued for the obvious, Phillip Torrone of the Edgadget website mentioned in his podcast that photomosaics had been patented in 2000. Sigh. Surely there must be tons of prior art to this idea? In a brutal act of defiance, I present my own photomosaic of myself. Take that, evil […]

Where your ascerbic host tears tears Steve Ballmer a new one over DRM, reports on his attempt to make AB’s Beefy Broth, and also mentions the terrific thttpd, a throttling http server by Jef Poskanzer.

Some patents are just too much fun, and the pat2pdf script allows you to look them up and get a look at them. Today’s fun patent is for the Slinky. The real invention was the machine that can take 80 feet of steel wire and coil it into a Slinky in 10 seconds. Now that’s […]

Fred von Lohmann has published an interesting article on the intricacies of law surrounding the development of P2P software entitled: What Peer-to-Peer Developers Need to Know about Copyright Law. It is a good article which tries to clearly describe what direct, contributory and vicarious liability means, and how developers can potentially avoid legal pitfalls in […]

Wherein your host is stirred (but barely shaken) by an earthquake and then goes on to ponder baseball, copyrights and other miscellaneous topics o’ the day. Addendum: It appears the earthquake did relatively little damage.

Apprently Microsoft can occasionally dimly see the light ahead: witness Yahoo! News – Microsoft Sings a New Tune With Windows Media Player 10. After years of dragging their feet about including MP3 ripping in their Media Player product, they have finally caved and made an encoder freely available. Of course it doesn’t rip variable bitrate […]

Slashdot had a link to Intellectual Property, and Free Riding by Mark Lemley. The abstract reads: Courts and scholars have increasingly assumed that intellectual property is a form of property, and have applied the economic insights of Harold Demsetz and other property theorists to condemn the use of intellectual property by others as free riding. […]

During one of my many explorations of the net, I found mention of a program called TimeTrax, a program which converts songs broadcast over XM Satellite Radio into mp3 files that you can play on your computer. This is especially nifty since XM radio doesn’t have DJ’s or the like, and you end up with […]