1. I am home in the Bay Area. My parents have a new dog. He is INSANE. He's a shepherd mix of some kind with wayyy too much energy, and he gets the other dog (who was high-energy to begin with) worked up, too. Maybe, just maybe, my parents will take a dog to an obedience class for the first time in three decades of pet ownership ( Read more... )

The Federal Circuit has just upheld a free/open source copyright license.

In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you're simply a copyright infringer. This is the ( Read more... )

The king hell god of copyright has decided to stop blogging, for multiple reasons, one of them being that "the current state of copyright law is too depressing":

Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models ( Read more... )

Dear UW CS Department,

Goddamn I love you guys.

I giggle thinking about what the UW DMCA committee thinks about this.

[via Rebecca Tushnet]

maradydd has an absolutely fantastic post up: "Six Misconceptions about Orphaned Works." Apparently there's some dumb asshole going around screaming about nonexistent problems and scaring the pants off people who, like himself, don't know much about the current copyright regime. Thanks for maradydd for her anti-FUD measures.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) just introduced, the day after the Super Bowl, the greatest bill ever: creating an exemption to the Copyright Act to permit churches to broadcast football games such as the Super Bowl without the NFL being able to come after them for infringement*, so long as the broadcast is live and the church doesn't charge a fee ( Read more... )

Remember there was a co-defendant in this case? Not just Grokster, but StreamCast, too ( Read more... )

Cool tool of the day:

Stanford has put together the initial release of its Copyright Renewal Database, where you can look up the copyright renewal records the U.S. Copyright Office received between 1950-1993 for books published in the United States between 1923-1963. Those decades were a special era in copyright law: during that time, copyright ( Read more... )

Just in time for Gizmodo's March boycott of the RIAA, Free Culture and One Laptop Per Child announce the Free Music Project. Happy listening ( Read more... )

Cue the only anti-"orphan works" exemption article I've ever seen. Reproduced under the cut:

( Read more... )