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 ...

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 ...

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? The challenge of accessing copyrighted material under fair use and how it impacts our education.

Sunday, January 22nd, 2006

Following the debate on fair use is a great way to dive into information economics. We all know and love that various kinds of media (audio, video, print...) are used to create songs, movies and books (or more generally "works"). These information creations are economically important as they are often ...

Go with the flow – The case for information policy compliance monitoring

Wednesday, October 20th, 2004

How do you control the flow of information in your organization? More importantly how to you secure these flows of information? It is impractical to physically protect all of an organization's sensitive information from being copied and stolen, because it is so easy to move information. Lower costs of bandwidth, ...

Infreemation Revolution

Tuesday, October 5th, 2004

The coming economic crisis in information I enjoyed reading Adam Rifkin's back of the envelope calculations about personal information storage and processing. I'm looking forward to trying to make at least a few of the @20 Gigabytes of information I will deal with in my life really count. I know a ...

Infreemation Part 3 – further reading

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2004

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 ...