Category: Intellectual Property

As the recent protests of SOPA and PIPA acts took place online, with major websites like Wikipedia and Boing Boing being blacked out to illustrate the implications of Internet censorship, I began to reflect on what this fight is all about. Amid all the claims that SOPA would break the Internet economy and give monopolistic control to a few select… Read more →

The recent victory over SOPA is to be shorter-lived than anyone might have thought. The very same day over 7,000 websites went dark to protest SOPA, the OPEN bill was introduced. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California) introduced H.R. 3782, the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act in the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday, the same day as an Internet… Read more →

Cory Doctorow has a great article over at The Guardian on how corporations are trying to exercise copyright over content long in the public domain. FedFlix is a charitable project launched by Carl Malamud, a “rogue archivist” who raises funds to digitise and upload videos created at US government expense. Under US law, government creations are in the public domain… Read more →

Cory Doctorow gave a talk recently on the subject of copyright, intellectual property and the coming war on general-purpose computers. It really is a great talk and I recommend you check it out. Read more →

The other day I blogged about Slate’s article, Don’t Support Your Local Bookstore. Salon has replied to Slate’s article, which I think severely misses the point of the article – which is that unlike local culture which is produced locally, the books available in bookstores are the same everywhere you go and thus the perennially snobbish should stop pretending bookstores… Read more →