“What the heck is the public domain?”

Disney characters respond..

What Intellectual Property Law Should Learn from Software

A new article of mine just came out in the Communications of the ACM.  An alert reader notified me that the article is behind a paywall — not available to those without subscriptions.  Luckily, Communications is a fine humane publication and agreed to let me keep copyright in the article.  Here it is..  My thanks to the editors of Communications and particularly to Moshe Vardi › Continue reading

Dissociated Press..

That’s the title of my new column in the Financial Times. It starts by talking about the Associated Press announcement that I had discussed earlier over on Techdirt.  But here I wanted to make a different point.  › Continue reading

Donaldson v. Beckett

Only true copyright geeks will find this exciting, but the picture below is the frontispiece from James Thomson’s The Seasons, published by Alexander Donaldson in 1774, and the subject of one of the most famous copyright cases of all time, Donaldson v. Beckett. › Continue reading

Rappers Discuss Law Profs Discussing Rappers..

One of the delights of researching and writing The Public Domain was that I got to research so many fields, from jazz and soul and hip hop to synthetic biology, constitutional history and the story of the VCR.  It was a dilettantes’ delight.  I also got to interview fascinating people.  Two such folk were the rappers who, together, make up The Legendary KO — Damien Randle and Micah Nickerson — the duo who wrote George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People as a protest about the handling of Hurricane Katrina by both the government and the media.

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The Public Domain in 2 Twitter sized bits..

Here are 2 points I wish people would understand.

1.) We are the first generation to deny our own culture to ourselves. › Continue reading

The Jazz Problem?

Another note in the research annals of our forthcoming comic on the history of musical borrowing.  For those who read about today’s wars over hip hop sampling and digital remix and think it a new battle fuelled by technological change, here’s an image that shows how old the fights are — even if one doesn’t trace them as far back as Plato. › Continue reading

Tom Bell thinks © extensions are Mickey Mouse..

Tom Bell is a thoughtful and provocative copyright scholar whose work I follow with interest.  On Technoliberation, he has a nice graph showing › Continue reading