Chris Dodd threatens Obama over SOPA/PIPA | MetaFilter

Pick up the pitchforks: David Pogue underestimates Hollywood « Clay Shirky Writing in his blog on the New York Times yesterday, David Pogue, one of the Times’ tech columnists, advises toning down the alarmist rhetoric over SOPA, suggesting that opponents of the bill (a…

Congress is not required to pay particularly close attention to the interests of the public when it passes copyright laws.*

Judge suggests DMCA allows DVD ripping if you own the DVD

Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion's free culture | Video on TED.com Open interactive transcript »…

::: the future of ideas ::: The Internet revolution has come. Some say it has gone. What was responsible for its birth? Who is responsible for its demise? In The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig explains how the Internet revol…

ROGUE URINALS | More Intelligent Life The Economist discovers a surprise cache of Marcel Duchamp's urinals ...…

The Black Seas of Copyright Howard Phillips Lovecraft became a major figure in the horror, science fiction, and fantasy genres when pulp fiction magazines published his stories in the 1920s and 1930s. Since his death i…

Sunstein Kann Murphy & Timbers LLP 1"Fixed" means fixed, by the author or with the author's permission, in a tangible means of expression, including, for instance, paper, CD-ROMs, film, or other media. The federal copyright statute do…

One of the most valid arguments open source proponents make against traditional, closed software is the problem of future-proofing. What happens if the company goes out of business, or if they cease development of the software? What if there was some way the software vendor and client could agree on some sort of third party source code escrow? Creative Commons contingency? (Probably this is not a new idea, but I haven't found any effective search terms.)

It looks likely that Mickey is in the public domain, contrary to claims made by Disney:

Brown went searching for flawed formalities -- and found one. It was on the title card at the beginning of a "Steamboat Willie" cartoon that had just been rereleased on a 1993 LaserDisc honoring Mickey's 65th birthday. [. . .] The key was location of the word "copyright" in relation to the name "Walt Disney." There were two other names listed in between -- Cinephone and Disney's top studio artist, Ub Iwerks. Arguably, any one of the three could have claimed ownership, thereby nullifying anyone's claim under arcane rules of the Copyright Act of 1909.