Edward Henigin offers a window into Giganews. Presented as a Lightning Talk at the latest NANOG in Philadelphia.

Up and to the Right: The Recent History of the Global Usenet Feed

At what point does excerpting from an article become illegal copying?

The prevailing wisdom is that content should roam widely online, but lackluster digital advertising of late has called that into question.

Copyright Holders Challenge Sites That Scrape Content

A world organized around centralized control, strict intellectual property rights, and hierarchies of credentialed experts is under siege. A radically different order of society based on open access, decentralized creativity, collaborative intelligence, and cheap and easy sharing is ascendant.

A new book, praised by John Seely Brown, DJ Spooky, Yochai Benkler, and others:

... thoroughly delightful ... penetrating ... masterful ... weaves a rich tapestry ... wonderful detail ...

Naturally the book is freely available for download. (It's also on sale in hardcover.)

From the archive:

If I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable.

Also:

History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly.

Viral Spiral

Amid the news of McCain's DMCA woes, Lawrence Lessig's new book is now on sale.

Lawrence Lessig, the reigning authority on intellectual property in the Internet age, spotlights the newest and possibly the most harmful culture war—a war waged against our kids and others who create and consume art. America’s copyright laws have ceased to perform their original, beneficial role: protecting artists’ creations while allowing them to build on previous creative works. In fact, our system now criminalizes those very actions.

For many, new technologies have made it irresistible to flout these unreasonable and ultimately untenable laws. Some of today’s most talented artists are felons, and so are our kids, who see no reason why they shouldn’t do what their computers and the Web let them do, from burning a copyrighted CD for a friend to “biting” riffs from films, videos, songs, etc and making new art from them.

Criminalizing our children and others is exactly what our society should not do, and Lessig shows how we can and must end this conflict—a war as ill conceived and unwinnable as the war on drugs. By embracing “read-write culture,” which allows its users to create art as readily as they consume it, we can ensure that creators get the support—artistic, commercial, and ethical—that they deserve and need. Indeed, we can already see glimmers of a new hybrid economy that combines the profit motives of traditional business with the “sharing economy” evident in such Web sites as Wikipedia and YouTube. The hybrid economy will become ever more prominent in every creative realm—from news to music—and Lessig shows how we can and should use it to benefit those who make and consume culture.

Remix is an urgent, eloquent plea to end a war that harms our children and other intrepid creative users of new technologies. It also offers an inspiring vision of the post-war world where enormous opportunities await those who view art as a resource to be shared openly rather than a commodity to be hoarded.

From the archive:

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. ...

-- John Donne

Jonathan Lethem wrote this 'remix' in the February 2007 issue of Harper's Magazine.

He elicited a response from Larry Lessig in the April 2007 issue:

In his beautifully crafted February criticism, "The Ecstasy of Influence", Jonathan Lethem teaches more about the importance of what I call "remix" than any other work I have read. Certainly more than my own work.

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy

Lawrence Lessig, in WSJ:

Digital technology has made it easy to create new works from existing art, but copyright law has yet to catch up.

Adapted from his new book.

In Defense of Piracy

Lawrence Lessig's new book goes on sale October 16. Pre-order today.

Lawrence Lessig, the reigning authority on intellectual property in the Internet age, spotlights the newest and possibly the most harmful culture war—a war waged against our kids and others who create and consume art. America’s copyright laws have ceased to perform their original, beneficial role: protecting artists’ creations while allowing them to build on previous creative works. In fact, our system now criminalizes those very actions.

For many, new technologies have made it irresistible to flout these unreasonable and ultimately untenable laws. Some of today’s most talented artists are felons, and so are our kids, who see no reason why they shouldn’t do what their computers and the Web let them do, from burning a copyrighted CD for a friend to “biting” riffs from films, videos, songs, etc and making new art from them.

Criminalizing our children and others is exactly what our society should not do, and Lessig shows how we can and must end this conflict—a war as ill conceived and unwinnable as the war on drugs. By embracing “read-write culture,” which allows its users to create art as readily as they consume it, we can ensure that creators get the support—artistic, commercial, and ethical—that they deserve and need. Indeed, we can already see glimmers of a new hybrid economy that combines the profit motives of traditional business with the “sharing economy” evident in such Web sites as Wikipedia and YouTube. The hybrid economy will become ever more prominent in every creative realm—from news to music—and Lessig shows how we can and should use it to benefit those who make and consume culture.

Remix is an urgent, eloquent plea to end a war that harms our children and other intrepid creative users of new technologies. It also offers an inspiring vision of the post-war world where enormous opportunities await those who view art as a resource to be shared openly rather than a commodity to be hoarded.

From the archive:

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. ...

-- John Donne

Jonathan Lethem wrote this 'remix' in the February 2007 issue of Harper's Magazine.

He elicited a response from Larry Lessig in the April 2007 issue:

In his beautifully crafted February criticism, "The Ecstasy of Influence", Jonathan Lethem teaches more about the importance of what I call "remix" than any other work I have read. Certainly more than my own work.

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy

U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Office of International Trade announced today that the domestic value of counterfeit and pirated products seized by CBP and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement increased by 2.7 percent in mid-fiscal year 2008 to $113.2 million compared to $110.1 million in mid-FY 2007.

The number of large-scale seizures also increased: rising from 296 IPR seizures with a domestic value equal to or greater than $100,000 in 2008 compared to 266 such seizures in mid-FY 2007. The first half of the fiscal year extends from Oct. 1 to March 28.

CBP Releases Intellectual Property Rights Seizure Statistics for Mid-FY2008

The future of both law and technology will require reconciling users' desire to self-disclose information with their simultaneous desire that this information be protected. Security of personal information and user privacy are potentially irreconcilable with the conflicting set of user preferences regarding information sharing behaviours and the convenience of using technology to do so. Social networking sites (SNSs) provide the latest and perhaps most complicated case study to date of these technologies where consumers' desire for data security and control conflict with their desire to self-disclose. Although the law may provide some data control protections, aspects of the code itself provide equally important means of achieving a delicate balance between users' expectations of data security and privacy and their desire to share information.

Data Control and Social Networking: Irreconcilable Ideas?

How relevant is it to declare oneself to be “for” or “against” copyright? Neither the stabilization nor the abolition of the copyright system seems within reach. All we see is a seemingly endless assembly line of new extensions to the law being proposed and enacted. The most recent is the proposed “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” (ACTA) [1], to be tabled at next month’s G8 meeting in Tokyo, including a clause known as the “Pirate Bay killer” that would force countries to criminalize services that may facilitate copyright infringement, even if not for profit. This is just one example of how copyright law is mutating into something qualitatively different than what it has been in previous centuries.

A very condensed version of copyright history could look like this: texts (1800), works (1900), tools (2000).

The Future of Copyright

Against the background of an unprecedented number of cybersquatting cases in 2007, the evolving nature of the domain name registration system (DNS) is causing growing concern for trademark owners around the world. Last year, a record 2,156 complaints alleging cybersquatting - or the abusive registration of trademarks on the Internet - were filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Arbitration and Mediation Center (Center), representing an 18% increase over 2006 and a 48% increase over 2005 in the number of generic and country code Top Level Domain (gTLDs and ccTLDs) disputes.

DNS Developments Feed Growing Cybersquatting Concerns