This wonderful little video came in by way of Google+ this morning, and I figured I'd share it: Copying Is Not Theft - YouTube

It comes from QuestionCopyright.org | A Clearinghouse For New Ideas About Copyright. Here's another: Credit is Due (The Attribution Song) | QuestionCopyright.org. Just because copying isn't theft, it ( Read more... )

Sign the PublicACTA Wellington Declaration! - Boing Boing

The PublicACTA activists have been meeting in Wellington, New Zealand -- site of the next round of negotiations on the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement -- drafting a declaration on how the next global copyright treaty should read, and how it should be negotiated.

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On the Google Book Search agreement (Lessig Blog)As many have, I've been eager to understand the terms of the settlement in the AAP/Authors Guild v. Google case (Google Summary, Actual Settlement). After spending some time studying it, here are my thoughts. (4TR: I was not part of any of these settlement negotiations so all this was news to me ( Read more... )

huge and important news: free licenses upheld (Lessig Blog)So for non-lawgeeks, this won't seem important. But trust me, this is huge ( Read more... )

So far I've not bothered posting about the Associated Press's ridiculous claim that a quoting even as few as half a dozen words from one of their articles is a copyright violation, and requires payment. But this one is simply too deliciously ironic to avoid.

Techdirt: AP Quotes Blogger In Discussing Bloggers Quoting AP; Hilarity EnsuesThe ( Read more... )

Commons Misunderstandings: ASCAP on Creative Commons (Lessig Blog)ASCAP's essay, "Common Understanding: 10 Things Every Music Creator Should Know About Creative Commons Licensing" nicely highlights some important considerations that any musician should review before using a CC license. Unfortunately, however, it also continues some common ( Read more... )

A couple of days ago, one of my CD customers asked me to confirm that it was OK for him to have put one of my tracks on a mix CD that he'd sent to 20 friends for Christmas. I assured him that it was perfectly OK, and told him, "fair use is free advertising." And besides, it's not ( Read more... )

Techdirt: Western Digital Decides That You Shouldn't Be Allowed To Share Any MP3Rich Kulawiec writes in to let us know about a Boing Boing post about some fairly ridiculous limitations on Western Digital's networked drives. Apparently, once you've set up the drive, you can subscribe to a service that will allow others to access your drive from the ( Read more... )

Techdirt: MPAA Takes University Toolkit Offline For GPL ViolationRemember last week how the MPAA was pushing a ridiculous toolkit on universities that was officially supposed to help universities track network usage, but also had the side-effect of potentially exposing all sorts of private info? Well, some folks noticed that the toolkit was built ( Read more... )

Freedom to Tinker » Blog Archive » Infinite Storage for MusicLast week I spoke on a panel called “The Paradise of Infinite Storage”, at the “Pop [Music] and Policy” conference at McGill University in Montreal. The panel’s title referred to an interesting fact: sometime in the next decade, we’ll see a $100 device that fits in your pocket and holds ( Read more... )