I have been granted sabbatical leave for the academic year 2008-2009 in order to write a book. The topic is related to my research into networks, and it will expand some of the ideas I’ve had in this area. One of the things I really wanted was to publish the Read more…
It’s week two in the Knitting Wars (or Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Copyright). I have been surprised by the level of interest this is generating in the blogosphere, it has been ORGd, EFFd and BoingBoinged, it has also been picked up by the knitting community (I did Read more…
The good people at the Open Rights Group forwarded me an email they received from a Doctor Who fan that goes by the screen name Mazzmatazz, who has allowed me to tell his/her story. But beware, this is a scary tale of copyright abuse that will have you hiding behind Read more…
Channel 4 has been airing a program called Picture This, where 6 members of the public who submitted their pictures to a competition were selected to compete for a gallery exhibition and a book deal. The program is being sponsored by Flikr, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that Read more…
(via Lessig blog and various mailing lists) Licence geeks know that Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation Licence (GFDL). This is a nifty little licence used for publishing documentation with software projects. However, the GFDL is incompatible with Creative Commons licences. The incompatibility comes because the copyleft clause Read more…
Those of you interested in Creative Commons may remember that the organisation was sued by a family in Texas as a result of a Flickr image that got misused by Virgin Mobile Australia (more details here). The complaint against Creative Commons from the Chang family was with regards to negligence, Read more…
Last week I was rather quiet for several reasons. On Wednesday I presented a paper entitled “Build Your Own World” at the beautiful Glasgow venue called The Lighthouse (available from the awesome Slideshare website). I was very impressed with the knowledgeable and diverse audience, but I am now a complete Read more…
Bloodspell: The rise of machinimaViewing and panel 22 November 20075.15 – 8.30pmLondon Metropolitan University Graduate Centre 166-220 Holloway RoadLondon, N7 8DB Bloodspell is the world’s first feature-length machinima, and it is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. Bloodspell “is a story of a world where men and women Read more…
Some readers may remember my previous comments about a dubious advertising campaign from Virgin Mobile Australia. Some of the pictures were clearly bordering on the defamatory, so it should come as no surprise that Virgin has been sued by one of the victims. However, what may prove truly surprising is Read more…
One more case in the ongoing battle in Spain between SGAE and small bars over copyleft music. Derecho de Internet reports on this latest appeal by the SGAE against a bar in Madrid called “Buenavistilla Social Club”. The collecting society initially lost the case and therefore appealed to have the Read more…