copyright category archive

Copyright Quibble

I was happy to share my Hawaii vacation pictures under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, but it occurred to me that I may not have the legal right to do so for several of them.
Three were taken by my wife, but I'm pretty sure she'll go along with me on the licensing choice.
Two of the [...]

When will the copyright holders want control over our mind's eye?

I read with interest Crosbie Fitch's rant: "In respect to the artist - NO PHOTOS".
With this statement: "anything that is available to the senses of the public visitor is available to be recorded by that visitor," I got to thinking about how copyright owners will try to control their "property" in the future.

It seems the [...]

Decriminalizing non-commercial file sharing

via QuestionCopyright.org:

Decriminalizing all non-commercial file sharing and forcing the market to adapt is not just the best solution. It’s the only solution, unless we want an ever more extensive control of what citizens do on the Internet. Politicians who play for the antipiracy team should be aware that they have allied themselves with a special [...]

Robert Heinlein Describes the Situation

Way back in 1939, in his first published science fiction short story:

There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such [...]

A Silly Post Brought to You by the Letters E and F

My daughter has a set of Sea & Learn Bath Shapes that are very entertaining for her and me and the wife alike. (The wife might not want to admit that. But for me I can say that they engage my brain more than a typical work-related meeting.)

I happened to notice that the [...]

Who will own (and police) our digital future?

So the RIAA and MPAA want the colleges and universities (and corporations and your grandmother and etc.) to enforce our out-of-control copyright laws. It's disturbing how much power these organizations already wield, and how much more power they think they should have in dictating how free the flow of information should be. Our [...]

Laying Claim to the Public Domain

We recently bought The Real Mother Goose book for our daughter, who is home from the hospital now and doing fine. I was reading some rhymes from it this evening and happened to turn to the copyright page in the front.
One thing interesting about this page is that there isn't actually a copyright notice. [...]

Slashdot Copyright Discussion (re: Gowers Report and Dead Artist Petition)

Slashdot has a story picked up from Lawrence Lessig about the Gowers report and resulting petition signed in part by dead artists. There is this comment by "Toby the Economist":

If I'm a painter, and I create a great work of art, does it pass into the public domain after n years?
If I'm a programmer, and [...]

Makin' Copies! 'The Promise of a Post-Copyright World'

Remember the Richmeister character from SNL? One of Rob Schneider's recurring characters. The sketches were funny, although it was the kind of potent stuff that quickly got overplayed.
The catchphrase--Makin' Copies!--occurred to me today in the wake of several things I've been reading about copying. When I looked around I found this transcript [...]

Architecture of Annoyance

If you found this post looking for how to make the HP Scanjet 2400 Scanner work in GNU/Linux, perhaps this post will help you: Yes, your HP Scanjet 2400 might work in Ubuntu and maybe even other flavors of GNU/Linux.
This isn't so much an Architectures of Control kind of item, but Dan Lockton's post about [...]