Remember Aaron Swartz, the information freedom activist who set off a broad online discussion about academic databases in 2011 when he downloaded about four million articles from JSTOR to make a point about how knowledge shouldn't be locked away from the public?

Swartz never put those four million articles online anywhere, or did anything else with ( Read more... )

So Amazon is now selling the Kindle in Japan, meaning they also have a Kindle store. I might be tempted to think this would enable Kindle-owning me to buy e-books from the Japanese Kindle store, seeing as I live in Japan and already have an account on amazon.co.jp to buy print books.

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Here's a short interview with Kal Raustiala, co-author of a very interesting new book called 'The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation'. Raustiala discusses how copyright is unnecessary in various creative industries. For instance, an absence of copyright protection encourages innovation in fashion, football, and cuisine. He also ( Read more... )

In The New Imperialism: Forcing Morality Shifts And Cultural Change Through Exported IP Laws, the always-informative Techdirt gives a rundown of recent incidents where pressure from US media companies forced countries to change their IP laws in ways that are against the interests of their own citizens. The whole thing is interesting and also ( Read more... )

Remember Cecilia Gimenez, the lady who tried to restore a fresco in a church near Zaragoza and did it wrong? The story is twisting down some interesting paths, copyright-wise.

According to El Correo (in Spanish, English via gTranslate), thousands of people started visiting the church in the town of Borja after the botched restauration became famous ( Read more... )

And how. From Michael Geist (he of the ACTA explanation video):

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On July 4, the European Parliament is having its final vote on ACTA, a secretly negotiated international treaty that threatens to expand the powers of multinational companies to police the internet in the name of fighting copyright infringement.

If you have a moment, please mail all MPs via the address europarl-all@falkvinge.net to express your ( Read more... )

Since I'm almost thirty and a new haircut just revealed a very distinguished grey streak over my forehead, I reckon I'm entitled to start talking about Kids These Days without including myself in that group.

Kids these days are awesome! Yesterday I did a guest lecture about fanworks and copyright for a group of foreign students at Kansai University ( Read more... )

Japan has passed a new law that criminalizes unauthorized downloading and copying, even for personal use, of copyrighted music and video. That means that by October, anyone who illegally downloads a song will be committing an offense worth maximum two years of jail time. The new law also mandates high fines for illegal downloading, up to two ( Read more... )

Today was the last day of the Japan Society for Research in Cartoons and Comics' annual big meetup, and the topic of the final session was doujinshi and copyright. On stage were a manga researcher, a fan researcher, an IP lawyer, a representative from a large publishing company, and a professional mangaka with strong ties to doujin fandom. They ( Read more... )