“Happy Birthday to You”: Still Private Property
When making the case that the terms of copyright protection are too long – currently, an author’s lifetime plus 70 years – it is not uncommon to note that “Happy Birthday to You” is still under...
View ArticleIn the Copyright Wars, the Great News & the Setbacks
Two recent developments suggest that the reactionary regime of maximalist copyright can still command a lot of raw political power to beat back commoners, flout legal principles and craft the law to...
View ArticleThe Ongoing Enclosure of the Public Domain
Unbeknownst to millions of people recovering from their celebrations the night before, New Year's Day is a mini-celebration nested within a more famous holiday. Who among us realized that it was.......
View ArticleThe U.S. Government vs. Networked Culture
Wow! The save-the-Internet protests by Wikipedia, Google, Reddit, Boing Boing and hundreds of other websites marks a watershed moment in the evolution of networked political expression. Millions of...
View ArticleHarvard Joins the Open Access Revolt
The publishers of research journals don’t get much attention because their products are not very exciting. Mentions of Science or Nature do not exactly quicken the pulse. But that doesn’t mean that...
View ArticleHow Sweet It Is! Internet Activists Defeat ACTA
Hollywood and the record industry got some serious comeuppance when the European Parliament overwhelmingly defeated a copyright maximalist treaty by a 478 to 39 vote on Wednesday. Ouch! This is a...
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Goodbye, Pete Seeger!
In a time when pop stars are most known for their silly haircuts, salacious outfits and fleeting half-lives, it is almost impossible to comprehend Pete Seeger, the legendary folk icon who died...
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Fixing the Law’s Bias Against Sharing
In the quest to imagine and build a new “sharing economy,” one factor that is often overlooked is law. What shall be the role of formal law in a world of social enterprises, shared workspaces,...
View ArticleThe Commons and EU Knowledge Policies
One of the great advantages of a commons analysis is its ability to deconstruct the prevailing myths of “intellectual property” as a wholly private “product” – and then to reconstruct it as knowledge...
View ArticleThe Impending Liberation of “Happy Birthday”
If the culture industries wonder why people have so little respect for copyright law these days, they need look no further than the Warner Music Group’s claimed copyright of the song “Happy Birthday.”...
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