You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Copyright Regulation’ category.
The second version of Amazon’s relatively successful ebook-reader “Kindle” comes with a new feature, the so-called “text-to-speech function”: it enables ebooks to be read aloud. So, while you are cooking or driving to work this feature allows you to continue “reading” a book. Computers have had this feature for a long time (e.g. to read aloud PDF documents) but the Kindle with its specialization on ebooks is the first to bring it to the world of mobile devices. Or better, it could be the first. Soon after the president of the US Authors Guild, Roy Blount, had publicly critized the feature in a New York Times piece titled “The Kindle Swindle” as a potential threat to audio books, Amazon gave in and agreed to disable text-to-speech on a title-by-title basis at the rightsholder’s request (see Slashdot). In his blog, Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig describes this as “caving into bullies“, emphasizes that Amazon did not violate any exclusive copyrights with this feature and bemoans that “users and innovators have less freedom“. Read the rest of this entry »
“It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”
(Karl Valentin and others)
Not so long ago, the monopolistic concept of musician’s copyright collective like the German GEMA or the British PRS seemed to last forever. Even in countries with more than only one copyright collective like the US (e.g. BMI, ASCP) membership is exclusive and all-encompassing, meaning that an artist is not allowed to license only some works differently.
Yet, jamendo’s recently launched service jamendo pro might prove that forever was yesterday. Jamendo is an aggregator of Creative Commons (CC) licensed music. Commercial revenue is shared equally between jamendo and the artists, non-commercial use is free. In spite of the collecting societies’ prohibition of any open content licensing such as CC, the back catalogue of Jamendo consists of already more than 15.000 albums. Read the rest of this entry »
The founder of the organization Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford and soon Harvard law professer, was one of the first to support Barack Obama’s run for precidency. He endorsed Obama even long before the Iowa caucuses in November 2007 on his blog. Funnily enough, the first paragraph of his endorsement reads like this:
“‘DON’T DO THIS!’ a friend wrote, a friend who never uses allcaps, a friend who cares genuinely about what’s good for me, and who believes that what’s good for me depends in part upon how easily I can talk to the next administration. ‘He is NOT going to win. She has it sewed up. DON’T burn your bridges before they’re hatched — so to speak.'”
Today, only hours after Obama’s inauguration, Lessig’s risky endorsement seems to pay off. The copyright notice on whitehouse.gov reads now as follows:
“Except where otherwise noted, third-party content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Whitehouse.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.”
Seems as if Creative Commons has arrived in the mainstream by now.
Last December I was invited to participate in Standord Law School’s Center for Internet and Society (CIS) speaker series with a talk on "The Copyright Dispute: A Transnational Regulatory Struggle". In a nutshell, most of what it was about can be grasped by looking at the stylized figure below:
Living up to its name, the CIS offers es a podcast feed of its speaker series via iTunes (Feed), where an audio version of my presentation and the following discussion (including comments from Larwence Lessig) is available. This great service leaves me with offering the slides (PDF) and an iTunes-free mp3-download (9,64 MB) of the talk.
(leonhard)
governancexborders.com 