public domain

Happy Birthday, Michael Hart

March 8, 2012
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Books prices plummet. Literacy rates soar. Education rates soar. Old structures crumble, as did the Church. Scientific Revolution. Industrial Revolution. Humanitarian Revolution. Inventor of the electronic book and my dear friend Michael S. Hart would have been 65 today. Each time I say or think that – “he would have been 65 today” – the [...]

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This Week In The Fight For Digital Culture

February 26, 2010

Much in the way of interesting and infuriating has gone on this week in the areas of intellectual property, privacy, digital rights, open source and Googlization. A lot of it comes down to the rights of citizens and businesses in a networked society both parties helped create, the crucial need to protect the public domain, [...]

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A List Of Lists

December 28, 2009

Lizzy Caston and I were to write a mode d’emploi for air travel in this day and age of the ever-orange threat advisory.  A sample: Lady, please do your best not to wear four-inch-heeled slouch boots and every metal ring and bracelet in your collection before entering airport security.  The grimace on your face as [...]

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Not Buying The Kindle

May 14, 2009

As a supporter of Project Gutenberg‘s eBook philosophy, I refuse to purchase a device that operates solely in proprietary file format and has hinky public domain vs. copyright and ownership issues associated with it. Lately, the PG-forum arguments for and against the Kindle have turned into ones of readability; subjective terms such as “comfortable” and [...]

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Copyright Infringement Is Not Theft

April 20, 2009

Especially not when the governments-RIAA-MPAA-AAP-IFPI collusion to extend copyright long after the death of the author, with no intention of ever honoring the spirit of the public domain, is considered legitimate. Solidarity with Pirate Bay In other news, the Swedish Pirate Party gained 3000 members in 7 hours, while a new report states that the [...]

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Day 1019: Fight The CDMCA!

June 11, 2008

Sweet ghost of Johannes Gutenberg, this is awesome! Gordon Duggan of Appropriation Art has put out a comic book about the ongoing, mostly covert efforts on the part of the Canadian government to lengthen that nation’s copyright terms (currently a moderate life-plus-fifty) and to stifle user rights. As Cory Doctorow says at BoingBoing, “this is just [...]

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Day 898: eBook News

February 11, 2008

One million books scanned at U of Michigan Librarians at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor threw themselves a party on Friday to celebrate a milestone in their ambitious effort to scan every single book in the collection. They scanned the one millionth book, leaving just 6.5-million to go. Google Book Search: The Good, [...]

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Day 881: More Evidence Of The Internet Killing Books Sales

January 25, 2008

Alchemist Author Pirates His Own Books … and increases sales dramatically. [Paulo] Coelho’s view is that letting people swap digital copies of his books for free increases sales. In a keynote speech at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich he talked about how uploading the Russian translation of “The Alchemist” made his sales in Russia [...]

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Day 683: Optimal Copyright Term Is 14 Years

July 13, 2007

So says mathematics (thanks, D) [Rufus] Pollock’s work is based on the pr[e]mise that the optimal level of copyright drops as the costs of producing creative work go down.  As it has grown simpler to print books, record music, and edit films using new digital tools, the production and reproduction costs for creative work in [...]

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Day 663: On Lessig’s Makeover

June 23, 2007

Stanford University law professor, Lawrence Lessig, officially departs from the intellectual property debate. His new area of study is corruption. I can’t honestly say it’s a big loss. Whomever wrote CopyCense: On Lessig ought to be the new “torchbearer.”  They get it. Lessig has proclaimed before that he was retiring from focusing on intellectual property, [...]

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