A couple of interesting developments

I wonder how the people at OpenFest will respond to this news from the Bulgarian foreign ministry:
http://blog.veni.com/?p=111
And more ‘commons sense’ from IPPR:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6095612.stm

Anti-credentialism

The P2P Foundation has been excerpting Unbounded Freedom.
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/

Michel Bauwens also sent me a long article on the political economy of peer production. It contains, among many other new formulations, one that I think is particularly intriguing – ‘anticredentialism’, defined as follows:
“P2P projects are characterized by equipotentiality or ‘anti-credentialism.’ This means that there is no a [...]

Can a sharing economy be a ‘fake’?

OpenBusiness is following up on a discussion by Larry Lessig and Joi Ito – “Is YouTube web 2.0 ?” They argue that there is a “fake sharing economy” emerging. YouTube does not allow downloading, nor does it encourage remixing, or re-use (in contrast to services like Revver). In that respect, YouTube is a service which [...]

Giants’ shoulders

I have long admired John Kay, Financial Times columnist, on these issues, and here is a recent column of his on innovation and copyright, which finishes with a few words of advice for Andrew Gowers:
http://www.johnkay.com/regulation/465
It has made me think again about Bob’s question of a few days ago. In response to my assertion that we [...]

Statistics and Creative Commons

For Intellectual Property Watch, Tove Iren S. Gerhardsen has just given a very interesting report back from the 23rd general assembly in Geneva of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA):
‘As part of its greater focus on accountability and transparency, the global pharmaceutical industry will launch a new code of marketing ethics next [...]

Academic publishing

I received this comment on Unbounded Freedom from a friend of a friend. Had there been more time, I would have liked to have gone further into this issue:
‘I am not qualified to evaluate the non academic publishing side of things. At the risk of appearing biassed I think you could make a bit more [...]

Could this be a win-win situation?

Vladimir has been listening to the Unbounded Freedom launch debate on Counterpoint-online. He says we should all be growing up… fast:
“What a heated debate
But then, I’m not surprised the debate took such a course. The motion was defined in such a way as to tempt participants into thinking that they fundamentally oppose each [...]

YouTube and copyright

The Wall Street Journal is running an interesting debate. Google’s purchase of YouTube, it says, makes it the leader in online video sharing, but it also raises some thorny copyright issues:
‘In an email debate, Harvard law professor John Palfrey argued that Google should leave the policing to copyright owners and not take an active [...]

Podcast of the launch debate

As a cultural relations think-tank, Counterpoint published Unbounded Freedom – as they say – ‘ to stimulate, inform and advance all sides of this debate, and to explore copyright alternatives more suited to the rapidly changing global circumstances of our digital age’.
To mark its publication, as part of the London Book Fair in the Century [...]

The thorny question of moral rights

Bob has been asking Scott about the interesting question of the moral rights of copyright owners and has a good example. My aforementioned friend Bill Thompson has always taken a strong position on this in an attempt to control the effects of anything he might write – for example:
‘I’d try hard to argue that [...]