Infreemation Part 3 – further reading
September 22nd, 2004 | by ian |People to look to for futher reading on intellectual property, especially copyright and patent.
John Perry Barlow
Wrote the influential Economy of Ideas in 1994 which is a great introduction to some of the issues facing intellectual property. I read it in Wired back then, and remember that it fascinated me but I didn’t really have the experience to really understand it. 10 years later it is far more urgently relevant to my world and the world we live in. John is a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Here is a short and sweet interview with John in Reason magazine.
Lawrence Lessig
This law professor’s book Free Culture is the most accessible quick study on the topic of copyright and is available as a free download. His blog is a great source of discussion of the latest issues in the field. Recently it has featured judge Richard Posner as a guest blogger weighing in with his considerable expertise. He is the founder of the Creative Commons copyright licence.
Michael Geist
For us Canucks (but as Adam say, definitely not just for us): Canadian law professor writes articles for the Toronto Star and maintains a site about Canadian privacy issues.
Cory Doctorow
An up and coming Canadian science fiction author known for his contributions to the eclectic news site BoingBoing and offering versions of his books available for download under the creative commons licence. Cory on why developing DRM is a waste of time in a talk he did for Microsoft Research.
Dan Gilmour
More on the topic of reliable information sources, Dan recently published We The Media. I haven’t read it yet but its on my shortlist and the issues covered have spawned a huge amount of attention in newspapers and blogs. It discusses how new media vehicules such as weblogging can provide reliable sources of information and discusses why blogging, real simple syndication (RSS) and other phenomena will change the ecology of our information-based society.