Creative Archive Licence
Saturday, April 16th, 2005 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »The UK has launched an initiative to release materials from the archives of the BBC, Channel 4, the Open University, and the British Film Institute in a form of the Creative Commons. The Creative Archive Licence will make materials available ...
Debunking Urban Legends
Thursday, February 26th, 2004 Posted in Uncategorized | Comments OffI ran across the amusing Urban Legends Reference Pages from a link at Lawmeme about an attempt by Corbis to track down somebody who mashed together a photo of John Kerry and Jane Fonda, in violation of copyright. Corbis includes ...
Imitation a Form of Flattery?
Friday, February 13th, 2004 Posted in Uncategorized | Comments OffOne of my students ran across the site of a teacher in Texas who's using the same weblog review assignment as the one my new media students did last semeseter. I don't really mind -- it's a good assignment, and ...
A Trip Through the Thickets of Law and Computer Games
Thursday, December 4th, 2003 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »At Law Meme, James Grimmelman has written an excellent article in the wake of the State of Play conference: "Free as in Gaming?." Grimmelman's article follows up (extensively) on a question posed by Yale Law Professor Yochai Benkler at the ...
The Market in Unrealestate
Sunday, November 16th, 2003 Posted in Uncategorized | Comments OffOn his weblog, Julian Dibbell chronicles his life as a seller of virtual goods and properties from Ultima Online. He claims that "On April 15, 2004, I will truthfully report to the IRS that my primary source of income is ...
Second Life Gives Users IP Rights to their Characters
Friday, November 14th, 2003 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »Lawmeme reports that Second Life, an avatar game discussed in recent posts, has made a decision to let player-characters keep the intellectual property rights they create. Players, for instance, have the right to sell movie rights for their character. See ...
McDonald's sues the dictionary
Tuesday, November 11th, 2003 Posted in Uncategorized | Comments OffClaiming tradmark abuse, McDonald's is trying to censor the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, which includes "McJob" in the latest edition of the dictionary, where the term is defined as "low paying and dead-end work."
Leave Nick's Mind Alone!
Saturday, November 8th, 2003 Posted in Uncategorized | Comments OffNick, in response to the recent Copyright and the Network Computer: A Stakeholder's Congress conference, asks the DRM-obsessed of the world to Stop Handcuffing My Mind. Nick has a good point -- most digital rights managements schemes are "code" for ...
Encouraging the WIPO to Consider Open Source
Sunday, September 21st, 2003 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »Just to followup on my earlier post on intellectual property: The EFF has launched a campaign to encourage the WIPO to reconsider its opposition to open source and collaborative approaches (actually, even worse, its US Patent and Trade Office-led refusal ...
The Future of Ideas (Belongs to Disney)
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2003 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »I recently read Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, a properly alarmist text about the Internet, the law, copyright, and the slow steady creep towards a future in which every text, ...
Creative Commons
Tuesday, April 8th, 2003 Posted in Uncategorized | Comments OffI just added a creative commons license symbol to this site, inspired by Jamie Boyle's superb presentation at the e(X)literature conference. CC licenses are legal documents that permit content creators to state explicitly how they are willing to let others ...