My new Financial Times column on the Obama Administration’s copyright policy just came out.. › read more
Its not supposed to be out ’til Jan 25th, but I just looked on Amazon and, fittingly, given that it is Public Domain Day, the paperback edition of my book is now available. But if $12 is too much, remember you can always download it for free.
“Public Domain Day. January 1st every year. If you live in Europe, January 1st 2010 would be the day when the works of Freud and Yeats and hundreds of other authors ranging from Havelock Ellis to Zane Grey emerge into the public domain — where they are freely available for anyone to use, republish, translate or transform. › read more
In Ray Bradbury’s 1953 classic, Fahrenheit 451, a “fireman” is a man who burns books “for the good of humanity.” Written at the height of the Cold War, the book paints a shockingly dystopian picture of a culture at war with its own printed record, one deeply infused by Bradbury’s love of books. › read more
Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks is the best book about the economics of an information society and the ways that peer production can transform some of our basic economic assumptions. › read more
The American Society for Information Science and Technology has just named The Public Domain Book of the Year for 2009. I am really honoured.
I am off to Madrid for FICOD09 — a Spanish conference on the digital environment. It looks ambitious, and I couldn’t help being amused by the announcement below..
There are good reasons to worry about the Google Book Search Settlement, as I explained at length here. But of all of the reasons to oppose it, this surreal statement is my favourite.
European officials fear that if the Google project goes ahead in the US, a yawning transatlantic gap will open up in education and research.
“Oh my God! The Americans are about to create a private workaround of the enormous mess that we regulators have made of national copyright policy! They will fix the unholy legal screwups that leave most of the books of 20th century culture unavailable, yet still under copyright! They will gain access to their cultural heritage — giving them a huge competitive advantage in education. This MUST BE STOPPED!! No one can be allowed to fix this for any other country because then we would be left alone stewing in our own intellectual property stupidity! We must forbid their progress in order to protect our ignorance.” › read more
My newest FT column…
They call it the 20th century black hole and it lives up to its name. Huge quantities of matter are drawn by an overwhelming force into an inaccessible vortex from which not even light can escape. Except here, the overwhelming force is copyright law and the stuff relentlessly sucked into an inaccessible center is our collective culture. › read more
Atlas Mugged is the title of an FT article I wrote a little less than a year ago, at the depths of the crash. The question I asked was simple. Would this experience change economics and policy orthodoxies, as the Great Depression did in the 30’s? › read more
