Non-commercial clauses in Creative Commons licences tend to be a controversial subject in open licensing circles. Creative Commons has released a sizeable and comprehensive report on the non-commercial definition that answers everything you ever wanted to know about NC. Still, a good number of people in the open camp insist Read more
Beautiful animation based on xkcd comic 442. Sharing through CC can create some amazing derivatives, but we already knew that. I Love xkcd from NoamR on Vimeo.
If one was to chart the tags used in this blog, it would be easy to get a sense of shift in interests through time. From early interest in P2P, passing through software patents, sprinklings of DRM and virtual worlds, one early topic that has received diminishing interest has been Read more
The Open Knowledge Foundation has announced the release of the version 1.0 of the Open Database Licence (ODbL). As the name implies, the ODbL is an open licence which protects data contained in databases, and allows the modification, redistribution, use and reuse of such data. Databases are protected either by Read more
Recently I have been re-reading several seminal works on Internet regulation, and I have to say that I have regained a lot of respect for Lessig’s Code (the original of course). Although I always respected the idea of regulation through architecture, the more I look at the way in which Read more
A number of musicians in the UK have sent a letter to The Times objecting to the use of their music by the British National Party (BNP) in order to raise funds. The problem appears to be that the BNP has legally got hold of several compilation CDs of folk Read more
Two years ago, author Mark Helprin published an article advocating for perpetual copyright, which was received with much derision from Cyberspace communities around the world. Lessig even went as far as starting a wiki to allow readers to respond to it, and the result was a comprehensive thrashing of the Read more
Big news from the Wikimedia Foundation, the governing body of Wikipedia. The Board of Trustees has announced that Wikipedia will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence (BY-SA). This is a huge step for Wikipedia, and follows an unprecedented governance exercise by the Wikipedia community, where 88% of an Read more
Creative Commons is currenlty running an online questionnaire about Noncommercial use. The blog post explaining the survey can be found here, and the actual survey can be found here. This is an important survey for many reasons. Noncommercial clauses allow users to use, reproduce and modify works as long as Read more
(First ear muffs, next headphones?) The British Performing Right Society (PRS) has been in the news recently thanks to its continuing struggle with Google. The PRS is also known for its forceful pursuit of performance fees from an unsuspecting public, such as suing companies whose workers listen to the radio Read more