brainwagon

Slashdot is running a story about a N.Y. Times article (registration required, yada yada) that details Guerrilla Drive-Ins, mobile parties that use a DVD player and an LCD projector, and show movies projected against a wall in impromptu locations. This is of course of questionable legality, given the warning that most DVDs specify (that they […]

While at the ballgame earlier this week, I found myself wondering whether the classic 7th inning stretch song, Take Me Out To the Ballgame was in the public domain. It is, having been written in 1908. You can read the Wikipedia entry for more information, and can even get a PDF of the sheetmusic or […]

After penning the article below, I was looking for a picture of the elusive Walter Carlisle (didn’t succeed), but I did find a nice page at the Library of Congress Website that has some nice pictures that you can download. Digging around more, you can find their collection of 2100 early baseball cards. I’m listing […]

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 […]

I guess I wasn’t paying attention: the Internet Archive has added a Feature Films section. The selection is fairly unremarkable for now, but contains a few films of interest: Night of the Living Dead, the classic Edmond O’Brien film D.O.A. , and the classic horror film The Brain that Wouldn’t Die. Enjoy!

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 […]

Today’s Gutenberg Gem is Edward Lasker, a rather colorful individual in the history of chess. He won the championship of Paris in 1912, in London in 1914, the New York City championship in 1915 and the Chicago championship in 1916, and then went on to become an International Master at the age of 75. He […]

While perusing a random copy of Scientific American from June 18, 1887, I ran across an interesting little nugget of mathematical niftiness: Lewis Carroll’s technique for computing the day of the week for any date in your head. Cool! It’s not quite as simple as the Doomsday algorithm, but then we are talking about Lewis […]

Picture this: you run across a reference to a patent that you want to read, but you are too cheap to spend the money that the U.S. Patent Office charges you to download images of the patent in question. What do you do? Apparently you use pat2pdf, a cool bash shell script that downloads TIFF […]

Just another example of an image that I scanned from the Dover book and colorized. I kind of like it! Now, the correction: in reviewing Fishman’s book on the Public Domain, I am reminded that the term “copyright free” is not synonymous with “public domain”. From Fishman, page 3/27, The words “copyright free” are often […]

Along with my usual rash of bills, today’s mail call included a DVD from Project Gutenberg. This CD contains 4 gigabytes of public domain texts, about 9500 individual volumes. Nifty! A single DVD which could be the start of a serious library. I’ve got some ideas for projects that make use of some of these […]