brainwagon

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled, and found that Grokster is not liable for copyright infringement of its users. You can read the decision here in PDF. The basics of the decision were roughly that Grokster did demonstrate that there was a substantial, non-infringing use for their software and that they had no […]

The Register reports that the CBO is advising Congressmen that Digital Rights Management is good for America. Well, for American business anyway. It is surprising (well, maybe not surprising, perhaps just disappointing) that the CBO completely ignores the central questions at the core of current discussions about copyright and instead lodges their heads firmly in […]

The Index of Free Expression asks Isn’t 50 years of copyright enough? The recording industry is lobbying the EU to extend their current term of 50 years for perfomances to keep control over recorded performances by Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash and ultimately, the Beatles. The recording industry thinks that the expiration of copyrights […]

News.com is running a story about the BSA’s new mascot, a ferret who lectures children about the perils of the copyright infringement. Children will play games where they destroy pirated software and collect licensing agreements. Oh good lord. How about teaching them the real facts of our absurd copyright system? That if they go into […]

Congressman Rich Boucher is guest blogging on Lawrence Lessig’s blog this week. Congressman Boucher is fairly rare amongst politicians in that he actually seems to understand many of the issues related to intellectual property rights. He is working to amend the DMCA to restore fair use rights to digital media, and is the author of […]

Tim Wu has a long list of idiotic quotes by Jack Valenti on Lawrence Lessig’s blog. I particularly like On the VCR, 1983 “We are facing a very new and a very troubling assault … and we are facing it from a thing called the video cassette recorder and its necessary companion called the blank […]

The Internet has been abuzz with comments about Senator Orrin Hatch’s INDUCE Act, which would criminalize any activity that “induces” copyright infringement as if it were actually copyright infringement. I doubt I could say anything about it which has not been said elsewhere, but it’s a law that would eviscerate the 1984 Supreme Court decision […]

Kevin Kelly had a very nice New York Times Op-Ed piece entitled Making My Own Music, which clearly elucidates the way that I’ve come to think about copyright issues and the value of the public domain. One small quote: Given the benefits of digitized films, there is little question that film buffs, powered only by […]

As of the 29th of June, Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome patent is 50 years old. I was surprised how interesting and informative it was, but don’t take my word for it. Update: The link above was broken, and has been updated to point to the patent hosted on Google.

It’s no secret I’m a huge fan of the public domain: the bits of our culture that are actually free for individuals to use as they see fit. I’ve promoted a couple of interesting public domain resources here, mostly Project Gutenberg. I’ve also had the pleasure of meating Brewster Kahle when he brought the Internet […]

The BBC is reporting that there will be no Daleks in the latest incarnation of the Dr. Who franchise. It appears that talks between the BBC and the estate of Terry Nation have broken down. At least here in the United States, copyrights and patents were intended as incentives for individuals to create and extend […]

Groklaw.net is reporting that Acacia Technologies has been filing litigation against websites for patent infringement on patents they received for a system for distributing video and audio over the Internet. I used pat2pdf to download the relevant patents: 5,132,992 5,253,275 5,550,863 6,002,720 6,144,702 The EFF have placed this patent on their list of ten most […]