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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
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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Here are 2 points I wish people would understand.
1.) We are the first generation to deny our own culture to ourselves. › Continue reading
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 is a thoughtful and provocative copyright scholar whose work I follow with interest. On Technoliberation, he has a nice graph showing › Continue reading
Strategies for the Digital Age: Beyond Mocking the Clueless
..In Robert Putnam’s fascinating book Bowling Alone he describes the way in which the threads of civil society and of trust frayed during the 20th century › Continue reading
From our music comic.. I wrote this up only two days ago and Keith Aoki turned it around and produced this..
(revised with comic life after thoughtful comments from readers.. Thanks!!) › Continue reading
And a lot more. In an interesting experiment, Techdirt has launched a signed “book club“. Apart from my book they are also including in the package signed copies of Bill Patry’s new book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, Boldrin and Levine’s Against Monopoly, Heller’s Gridlock Economy and Mike Masnick’s Approaching Infinity. Best of all, you get a.. › Continue reading
And the men, too, of course – but bear with me. › Continue reading
I have been rereading the legislative history of the 1909 Copyright Act. I have come to the conclusion that 100 years ago we were smarter about copyright, about disruptive technologies, about intellectual property, monopolies and network effects than we are today. › Continue reading