Creative Commons has released their Podcasting guide, which strangely enough, provides legal advice for podcasters. This guide applies only to American law, so its relevance for us outside of the land of stars and stripes will be limited, but it still contains some valuable tidbits and a lot of links Read more…
Some people may remember Gary McKinnon, the British system administrator who was arrested in 2002 for hacking into NASA, the American Department of Defense and the U.S. Airforce. McKinnon has been convicted in absentia in the United States for those offenses, and he is back in the news as he Read more…
(Via Andrew Adams) The long-awaited report on the European Database right has now been issued. The study provides some very strong evidence against the right, as it seems that database production in Europe has actually decreased since its implementation, while production in the United States for the same period, and Read more…
This is an excellent article in The Guardian by Wendy Grossman. The problem of webcasting and collecting agencies is gathering momentum as there is a meeting this week in Geneva at WIPO, where member states are negotiating the inclusion of webcasting and simulcasting into a new treaty on the protection Read more…
Are deep links legal? Deep links are outgoing hyperlinks that do not lead to the front page of the hosting website. You may ask, what is the problem? That is how the Internet works, right? Initially, you would be right, as deep links were defeated in earlier copyright cases such Read more…
Complicated publicity stunt or new economic model? As previously reported, there is growing economic importance in virtual worlds and MMORPGs. Players make virtual money from selling loot and goods within game. The in-game economics can be complex and involve all sorts of new assumptions about value, and warrant studies on Read more…
I have finished reading a report by the Committee for Economic Development, which has membership from representatives from IBM, GE and Citigroup (not precisely a group of leftie pinko liberals). Their report is entitled Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness. The report is considerably Read more…
(via Legal Theory Blog). I have been reading some of the reports by Lawrence Solum from the symposium Bloggership: How Blogs are Transforming Legal Scholarship from Harvard’s Berkman Centre. It seems like this was a very successful event, with an impressive arrange of thought-provoking papers about academy, lawyering and blogs. Read more…
How do you promote an open source browser if you have no money for glitzy marketing? Organise a competition and let the fan’s originality do the job. Firefox has awarded fan videos entered into their Flick competition. First prize went for Daredevil, an ad about a surfing 12 year-old. The Read more…
(Via Carolina Botero) Spanish courts have delivered the third ruling in favour of Creative Commons (more accurately, copyleft licences in general) and against collecting agencies. The Spanish music collecting agency, the SGAE, has just lost another case brought against a bar for not paying licence fees. The previous cases can Read more…