The legal limits of creativity explored: Recut Reframe Recycle

Saturday, January 12th, 2008

Danah Boyd points out that the center for social media has released an informative paper entitled Recut Reframe Recycle concerning the boundaries of fair use (fair dealing in Canada) in digital media. Types of use they point out: • Parody and satire • Negative or critical commentary • Positive commentary • Quoting to trigger discussion • ...

Infreemational news for the new year

Monday, January 8th, 2007

More signs that the music industry is realizing just how bad DRM is for business and experimenting with distributing music without digital rights controls: "The majors . . . have got to capitulate, or they will continue to have a fractured digital media market that will slow down and stagnate," says ...

Freeconomics and the copybot: consequences for intellectual property

Tuesday, November 28th, 2006

Chris Anderson of Long Tail fame "cheekily" coins freeconomics as shorthand for his more recent thesis on "economics of abundance". (I should mention that he does so with apologies to Freakonomics) Anderson points out how technology that was once scarce is fast becoming a cheap enough commodity to be offered ...

Intellectual Property absurdisms

Tuesday, November 28th, 2006

There is a gold rush on intellectual property, testing the coherence of IP law. Many are bordering on the absurd, here is an example reported at Techdirt: more bizarre is the lawsuit the company is facing down in Chile where Microsoft dared to offer a version of its software in the ...

DMCA exceptions granted

Monday, November 27th, 2006

The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a law in the United States which criminalizes technology which circumvents copyright. It has been widely criticized. Ed Felten at Freedom to Tinker reports some exceptions to the DMCA were recently granted: six exemptions were granted, the most ever: * Professors ...

Telus gets it?

Thursday, October 26th, 2006

Most of us remember Telus taking a huge misstep on the network neutrality issue by blocking access to its union website. In an amazing about face Telus seems to have done some homework, obviously doing a bit of soul searching to figure out its role in the information economy. CEO Darren ...

Alternatives to DRM? [Updated: YouTube’s perfect storm]

Tuesday, September 5th, 2006

UPDATE: Google has bought YouTube for 1.6+ Billion and there is a hell of a debate going on surrounding Mark Cuban's criticism of Google's purchase and the actual value of YouTube given that it does not use DRM, therefore requiring copyright holders to monitor the site themselves and constantly ask them ...

The Internet Wants to Be Free

Sunday, June 4th, 2006

In my previous post I argue that internet neutrality legislation could help ease the transition to an internet society and economy. On further thought and debate I'm not really sure that regulation would be the most constructive response to the threat of network discrimination. The internet has a long history ...

Fair use and network neutrality – is there a stable solution?

Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006

In his post "Fair Use and Network Neutrality" Lessig draws a connection which did not seem to previously exist but appeals to me as I have been looking for an excuse to talk about both in the same breath. He says: "...in a fundamental sense, fair use (FU) and network neutrality ...

Are search engines illegal or fair use?

Thursday, January 26th, 2006

In a significant ruling reported by EFF and Boing Boing, Google's cache is ruled to be legal and consistent with fair use. This likely helps pave the way for the book search project: The court granted summary judgment in favor of Google on four independent bases: Serving a webpage from the Google ...