http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/art_in_the_era_of_the_internet_and_why_open_education_matters.html/art-in-the-era-of-the-internet-and-why-open-education-matters-open-culture Art in the Era of the Internet (and Why Open Education Matters) - http://t.co/VurLbK9T ]]> Thu, 29 Mar 2012 01:35:38 -0700 http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/art_in_the_era_of_the_internet_and_why_open_education_matters.html/art-in-the-era-of-the-internet-and-why-open-education-matters-open-culture http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/01/caleb_crain_why_matt_yglesias_is_wrong_about_copyright.html It turns out that Kant didn't think that an author could mount a strong legal case against piracy based on property rights in words. After all, even after pirates copied an author's words, the author himself still had them. It was better for an author to argue that his book was not an object but an exercise of his powers, which "he can concede, it is true, to others, but never alienate". In other words, ... a pirated book was not to be understood as property that had been stolen; it was rather a speech act that had been compromised.… ]]> Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:28:23 -0700 http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/01/caleb_crain_why_matt_yglesias_is_wrong_about_copyright.html http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/internet-regulation-the-economics-of-piracy//internet-regulation-amp-the-economics-of-piracy-cato-liberty Internet Regulation & the Economics of Piracy http://t.co/CXiWp8I0 ]]> Thu, 19 Jan 2012 08:08:17 -0700 http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/internet-regulation-the-economics-of-piracy//internet-regulation-amp-the-economics-of-piracy-cato-liberty http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21334-kopimism-the-worlds-newest-religion-explained.html Isak Gerson is spiritual leader of the world's newest religion, Kopimism, devoted to file-sharing. On 5 January the Church of Kopimism was formally recognised as a religion by the Swedish government. Tell me about this new file-sharing religion, Kopimism. We were founded about 15 months ago and we believe that information is holy and that the act of copying is holy. Why make a religion out of file-sharing? Why not just be an ordinary club without defining yourselves as being a religious community? Because we see ourselves as a religious group, a church seems like a good way of organising… ]]> Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:32:57 -0700 http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21334-kopimism-the-worlds-newest-religion-explained.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street A trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally covers, for the purpose of "trapping" potential copyright violators of the map, who will be unable to justify the inclusion of the "trap street" on their map. On maps that are not of streets, other "copyright trap" features (such as non-existent towns or mountains with the wrong elevations) may be inserted or altered for the same purpose.[1] Trap streets are often nonexistent streets; but sometimes, rather than actually depicting a street where none exists, a map… ]]> Sun, 16 Oct 2011 09:10:08 -0700 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~rlrutsky/RR/Consumption.pdf  Although information spreads, virus-like, through replication, this replication, as Walter Benjamin foresaw, involves a dispersion that allows images or data to be seen in different places, in different contexts (what Benjamin (1969) called “exhibition value”). It is, however, only through the process of consumption that this reproduction and dissemination of data can occur. Consumption, in short, is the means by which information, whether expensive or free, reproduces and spreads. Information, in fact, depends upon consumption for its very existence. Without being consumed, it ceases to be information in any practical sense, becoming merely a static and inaccessible knowledge, an eternal… ]]> Wed, 03 Aug 2011 06:00:18 -0700 http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~rlrutsky/RR/Consumption.pdf http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/printout/0,29239,2032304_2032746_2032903,00.html A decade ago, four young men changed the way the world works. They did this not with laws or guns or money but with software: they had radical, disruptive ideas, which they turned into code, which they released on the Internet for free. These four men, not one of whom finished college, laid the foundations for much of the digital-media environment we currently inhabit. Then, for all intents and purposes, they vanished.

In 1999 a Northeastern University freshman named Shawn Fanning wrote Napster, thereby pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing and a new paradigm for consuming media without the… ]]> Wed, 01 Dec 2010 05:22:00 -0700 http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/printout/0,29239,2032304_2032746_2032903,00.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ISil7IHzxc&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Wed, 10 Nov 2010 06:19:00 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ISil7IHzxc&feature=youtube_gdata http://www.openculture.com/2010/11/in_praise_of_copying_grab_a_free_copy.html Just a quick fyi: If you head over to the Harvard University Press web site, you can grab a free copy of Marcus Boon’s new book, In Praise of Copying, which makes the case that “copying is an essential part of being human, that the ability to copy is worthy of celebration, and that, without recognizing how integral copying is to being human, we cannot understand ourselves or the world we live in.” Boon is a writer, journalist and Associate Professor in the English Literature department at York University, Toronto. You can download a free copy of his book in… ]]> Wed, 03 Nov 2010 08:26:00 -0700 http://www.openculture.com/2010/11/in_praise_of_copying_grab_a_free_copy.html http://www.radioopensource.org/the-ecstasy-of-influence/ We can’t stop talking about Jonathan Lethem’s essay in this month’s Harper’s. If you haven’t read it, you really should. Nothing that follows in this post will be nearly as interesting. Go ahead. And this post will still be here when you return. You know you want to.
plagiarism

Caught [Digirebelle / Flickr]

Nearly every word of this essay about cultural borrowing and reworking was stolen — er, appropriated — from some other source and then cobbled together with a big dose of Lethem magic to form a cohesive whole. Even the “I”s… ]]> Sat, 29 May 2010 02:01:00 -0700 http://www.radioopensource.org/the-ecstasy-of-influence/ http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387 Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.

The author of the story I've described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale… ]]> Sat, 29 May 2010 02:00:00 -0700 http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23683 Though Gutenberg's invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect. And no one today can foresee except in broad and sketchy outline the far greater impact that digitization will have on our own future. With the earth trembling beneath them, it is no wonder that publishers with one foot in the crumbling past and the other seeking solid ground in an uncertain future hesitate to seize the opportunity that digitization offers them to restore, expand, and promote their backlists to… ]]> Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:51:00 -0700 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23683 http://harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law.html Every age has its potential regulator, its threat to liberty. Our founders feared a newly empowered federal government; the Constitution is written against that fear. John Stuart Mill worried about the regulation by social norms in nineteenth-century England; his book On Liberty is written against that regulation. Many of the progressives in the twentieth century worried about the injustices of the market. The reforms of the market, and the safety nets that surround it, were erected in response. This regulator is code—the software and hardware that make cyberspace as it is. This code, or architecture, sets the terms on which… ]]> Sun, 07 Feb 2010 10:20:00 -0700 http://harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law.html http://www.tnr.com/article/the-love-culture?page=0,0 In early 2002, the filmmaker Grace Guggenheim--the daughter of the late Charles Guggenheim, one of America’s greatest documentarians, and the sister of the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who made An Inconvenient Truth-decided to do something that might strike most of us as common sense. Her father had directed or produced more than a hundred documentaries. Some of these were quite famous (Nine from Little Rock). Some were well-known even if not known to be by him (Monument to a Dream, the film that plays at the St. Louis arch). Some were forgotten but incredibly important for understanding American history in the… ]]> Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:17:00 -0700 http://www.tnr.com/article/the-love-culture?page=0,0 http://www.goodcopybadcopy.net/ A documentary about the current state of copyright and culture ]]> Mon, 14 Sep 2009 03:17:00 -0700 http://www.goodcopybadcopy.net/ http://www.wired.com/dualperspectives/article/news/2009/06/dp_opensource_wired0616 Not long ago mass media was about the only kind of culture there was. The lucky few creative works that made it into general circulation were what copyright law was supposed to cultivate and protect. In the words of Harvard Law School intellectual law professor William Fisher, copyright "provides incentives for creative activities that otherwise would not occur." The dirty secret of mass media, though, was — and still is — that a great deal of it belongs to the companies that distribute it, rather than to the people who make it. That's begun to change as the internet rewrites… ]]> Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:08:00 -0700 http://www.wired.com/dualperspectives/article/news/2009/06/dp_opensource_wired0616