From Bruce Sterling’s “2009 Will Be a Year of Panic” (Seed: 29 January 2009): Let’s consider seven other massive reservoirs of potential popular dread. Any one of these could erupt, shattering the fragile social compact we maintain with one another in order to believe things contrary to fact. … 2. Intellectual property. More specifically, the [...]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Glyn Moody’s “The duplicitous inhabitants of Second Life” (The Guardian: 23 November 2006): What would happen to business and society if you could easily make a copy of anything – not just MP3s and DVDs, but clothes, chairs and even houses? That may not be a problem most of us will have to confront [...]
Posted on November 29th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Richard Stallman’s “Transcript of Richard Stallman at the 4th international GPLv3 conference; 23rd August 2006” (FSF Europe: 23 August 2006): Anyway, the term “intellectual property” is a propaganda term which should never be used, because merely using it, no matter what you say about it, presumes it makes sense. It doesn’t really make sense, [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Jonathan Handel’s “Is Content Worthless?” (The Huffington Post: 11 April 2008): Everyone focuses on piracy, but there are actually six related reasons for the devaluation of content. The first is supply and demand. Demand — the number of consumers and their available leisure time – is relatively constant, but supply — online content — [...]
Posted on October 12th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Foreign Policy‘s interview with Richard A. Clarke, “Seven Questions: Richard Clarke on the Next Cyber Pearl Harbor” (April 2008): I think the Chinese government has been behind many, many attacksâ€â€penetrations. “Attacks†sounds like they’re destroying something. They’re penetrations; they’re unauthorized penetrations. And what they are trying to do is espionage. They’re engaged in massive [...]
Posted on April 13th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Farhad Manjoo’s “iPod: I love you, you’re perfect, now change” (Salon: 23 October 2006): … though iPods can store thousands of songs, the average iPod user’s library numbers just about 500 well-worn tracks. Related posts What happens to IP when it’s easy to copy anything? Steve Jobs has changed 4 industries Russian music sites [...]
Posted on October 23rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From The Internet Archive’s “Orphan Works Reply Comments” (9 May 2005): The Internet Archive stores over 500 terabytes of ephemeral web pages, book and moving images, adding an additional twenty-five terabytes each month. The short life span and immense quantity of these works prompts a solution that provides immediate and efficient preservation and access to [...]
Posted on August 20th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Clifton Leaf’s “The Law of Unintended Consequences” (Fortune: 19 September 2005): Whatever the answer, it’s clear who pays for it. You do. You pay in the form of vastly higher drug prices and health-care insurance. Americans spent $179 billion on prescription drugs in 2003. That’s up from … wait for it … $12 billion [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Clifton Leaf’s “The Law of Unintended Consequences” (Fortune: 19 September 2005): The Supreme Court’s decision in 1980 to allow for the patenting of living organisms opened the spigots to individual claims of ownership over everything from genes and protein receptors to biochemical pathways and processes. Soon, research scientists were swooping into patent offices around [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Clifton Leaf’s “The Law of Unintended Consequences” (Fortune: 19 September 2005): For a century or more, the white-hot core of American innovation has been basic science. And the foundation of basic science has been the fluid exchange of ideas at the nation’s research universities. It has always been a surprisingly simple equation: Let scientists [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Barry C. Lynn’s “The Case for Breaking Up Wal-Mart” (Harper’s: 24 July 2006): As the industrial scholar Alfred D. Chandler has noted, the vertically integrated firm — which dominated the American economy for most of the last century — was to a great degree the product of antitrust enforcement. When Theodore Roosevelt began to [...]
Posted on July 30th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Mark Sableman’s “Copyright reformers pose tough questions” (St. Louis Journalism Review: June 2005): It goes by the name “digital rights management” – the effort, already very successful, to give content owners the right to lock down their works technologically. It is what Washington University law professor Charles McManis has characterized as attaching absolute “trade [...]
Posted on July 29th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “A Speech Delivered In The House Of Commons On The 5th Of February 1841” (Prime Palaver #4: 1 September 2001): The principle of copyright is this. It is a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers. The tax is an exceedingly bad one; it is a [...]
Posted on July 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “A Speech Delivered In The House Of Commons On The 5th Of February 1841” (Prime Palaver #4: 1 September 2001): The question of copyright, Sir, like most questions of civil prudence, is neither black nor white, but grey. The system of copyright has great advantages and great disadvantages; and it is [...]
Posted on July 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Mark Sableman’s “Copyright reformers pose tough questions” (St. Louis Journalism Review: June 2005): Kembrew McLeod of the University of Iowa explained how as a graduate student he applied for a federal trademark registration on the phrase “freedom of expression” as a joke, not really expecting that even a green-eye-shaded trademark examiner would approve it. [...]
Posted on July 18th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From American Association for the Advancement of Science’s “The Effects of Patenting in the AAAS Scientific Community” [250 kb PDF] (2006): Forty percent of respondents who had acquired patented technologies since January 2001 reported difficulties in obtaining those technologies. Industry bioscience respondents reported the most problems, with 76 percent reporting that their research had been [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Betsy Rosenblatt’s “Moral Rights Basics“: The term “moral rights” is a translation of the French term “droit moral,” and refers … to the ability of authors to control the eventual fate of their works. An author is said to have the “moral right” to control her work. … Moral rights protect the personal and [...]
Posted on May 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Scott Kleper’s “An Introduction to Copyfighting“: I think a lot of people incorrectly assume that Copyfighters are people who believe that copyright should be abolished and that everything should be free. Copyfighters aren’t saying that all media should be freely distributed. We are saying that as consumers of media (film, television, software, literature, etc.) [...]
Posted on May 9th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From “Statement by India at the Inter-Sessional Intergovernmental Meeting on a Development Agenda For WIPO, April 11-13, 2005” (emphasis added): “Development”, in WIPO’s terminology means increasing a developing country’s capacity to provide protection to the owners of intellectual property rights. This is quite a the opposite of what developing countries understand when they refer to [...]
Posted on May 9th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Financial Times” “James Boyle: Deconstructing stupidity“: Thomas Macaulay told us copyright law is a tax on readers for the benefit of writers, a tax that shouldn’t last a day longer than necessary. … Since only about 4 per cent of copyrighted works more than 20 years old are commercially available, this locks up 96 [...]
Posted on May 9th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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