Paul sez,
Over the last few months a couple of academics and free culture activists working together in the Communia network have drafted a manifesto about the public domain in the digital age.
This public domain manifesto was launched yesterday and we are looking for signatures (we already have quite a lot of them).
— Read the rest
Jamie "Public Domain" Boyle sez, "When Ray Bradbury's 1953 classic, Fahrenheit 451 was published, it was scheduled to enter the public domain this month — January 1, 2010. But then we changed the law. And Bradbury's firemen look like pikers compared to the cultural conflagration that ensued. — Read the rest
Few people are as qualified to write a book about the copyright wars as William Patry: former copyright counsel to the US House of Reps, advisor the Register of Copyrights, Senior Copyright Counsel for Google, and author of the seven-volume Patry on Copyright, widely held to be the single most authoritative work on US copyright ever written. — Read the rest
Two years ago, fantasy novelist Mark Helprin published an op-ed in the New York Times arguing for perpetual copyright. The essay was so ham-fisted and odd that a lot of people assumed that it was a joke, but now that he's published a book on the subject, Digital Barbarism, we can be pretty sure he wasn't kidding. — Read the rest
Last month, I wrote about the release of Jamie Boyle's The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind a new book by one of copyright's leading and most erudite scholars. I've just finished reading my review copy (you can get a free copy too — the book is CC licensed and free to download) and I wanted to drop in a short review. — Read the rest
Here's part five of the Boing Boing Holiday Gift Guide, a roundup of the bestselling items from this year's Boing Boing reviews. Today's installment is nonfiction books.
Don't miss the rest of the posts: kids' stuff, fiction, gadgets and comics. — Read the rest
Here's part four of our week-long "Best of Boing Boing" holiday gift guide: basically, it's a list of the bestselling items from among the stuff we reviewed this year, reflecting your favorite items from among our picks. Today's list is comics, graphic novels, funnybooks and the like. — Read the rest
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's venerable Ideas programme just aired a fantastic one-hour segment on copyright called "Who Owns Ideas?" with a wide range of interviews with me, James Boyle, Steve Page from BNL, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Eric Flint, Michael Geist and many others. — Read the rest
Fred from FreeCulture NYU sez, "In late April of this year, The New York Institute for the Humanities hosted a conference on fair use at NYU. Entitled The Comedies of Fair U$e, the conference brought together artists, photographers, musicians, directors, students and lawyers to discuss the current state of fair use and how it relates to to their work. — Read the rest
Donna Wentworth sez, "James Boyle has just delivered the piece de resistance in his three-part series on copyright for the Financial Times: 'Deconstructing Stupidity.' The stupidity in question is the way that governments typically make intellectual property law and policy — that is, without evidence that it will produce the desired social or economic benefit." — Read the rest
James Boyle, an amazing academic copyfighter, has written a positively brilliant column for the Financial Times on the crazy way that IP policy gets made — without any evidence, without any followup. In particular, Boyle writes about database copyright, which Americans don't have and which Europeans do have — and how the European database industry is atrophying under this punishing regime that allows companies to own collections of facts. — Read the rest