copyright
How I tried (and failed at) legally buying music in Germany
Please note: What’s about to follow is a rant. It’s also advice to music labels. Short-short version, dear content traders: Make your stuff more easily available.
This is a story of a sucky customer experience. As customers and experts alike will tell you, users like to rock, not to suck.
Buying music online is supposedly easy. Or […]
Re:publica 08 #3 (Law)
One of the best panels My favorite panel at re:publica was Henning Krieg’s panel on law and blogging. At pretty much every other conference I missed out on Henning’s quite famous talks, and it was no surprise to find the room packed to the limits. Relaxed, informal and funny presentation, a lot of value for […]
How Creative Commons Can Interact With Commerce
Over the last couple of years, Creative Commons licenses have become pretty widely adopted in the non-commercial field. (You’ll find a great number of blogs and podcasts under a non-commercial Creative Commons license.)
But what about commercial use? Are Creative Commons licenses the natural enemy of commercially used contents? By no means, quite the contrary. Here’s […]
A Swarm of Angels: Poster release
If you’ve been following this blog for awhile, you might be familiar a film project I find to be really neat: A Swarm of Angels (former posts of mine here) will be a real, and radical, innovation: It’ll be big-ass, professionally produced movie funded (in terms of both money and creativity) by a community of […]
Cory Doctorow: New column about copy-friendly business models
The Guardian has started a 5-part column (”Copy Killers”) by Cory Doctorow. In the series, Cory shows what is so bad about Digital Rights Managements (DRM, also dubbed Digital Restrictions Management), and explain copy-friendly business models.
DRMs are often designed by ambitious, well-funded consortia, with top-notch engineers from every corner of the industry. They spend […]
Peer-to-peer networks a threat to national security, or: How to track who pays your Congressman
Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks allegedly threaten America’s national security, according to US Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.).
Pardon me?
Waxman said…
… he was troubled by the possibility that foreign governments, terrorists or organized crime could gain access to documents that reveal national secrets.
Like, how? Oh, wait, here it comes. Summarizes ZDNet:
…peer-to-peer networks can […]
Copyright on a Napkin
In this drawing, I attempt to explain the wonderful world of copyright law. As an aside, I think that all intellectual property (i.e. patent, trademark, copyright, and trade secret) lawyers like writing about copyright. Because we’re all familiar with stuff that copyright protects - books, movies, CDs, DVDs, radio, TV, and the like. Even if, […]
Our Second Life book going into print soon
Together with Thomas Praus (aka DJ Stylewalker) and Max Senges I’ve recently got the chance to write a summer university school for Barcelona-based university UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya), as well as a book to go with it. Both the course and the book are all about virtual worlds, particularly Second Life.
I’ve always had […]
Great copyright documentary: Good Copy Bad Copy
Good Copy Bad Copy (Denmark, 2007) is an amazing short documentary about copyright & remixing culture.
(Also, it features Yochai Benkler in a great video interview at Re:Publica 2007 Wizards of OS 4 (Thanks, Thomas!), which is so much less blurry more professionally produced than the snippets (1, 2, 3, 4) I shot with Thomas […]
Our UOC Second Life textbook: released under CC license
A few weeks ago, Max Senges, Thomas Praus and I got the chance to draft and write a summer university course about Second Life for the UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, or Open University of Catalonia), a Barcelona-based university. Along with the course, of course, a textbook was needed.
Writing the book (”Virtual Worlds […]
IFPI rhetorics imply that file-sharing supports terrorism
A few days ago, IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) put out a press release titled “ten inconvenient truths“, which claims to offer new insights into the dirty world of digital piracy.
Apart from the fact that the titles is a rather weak reference to the movie about Al Gore and global warming (”An Inconvenient […]
New German lawblog: kriegs-recht.de
Don’t be irritated by the website’s name (”Kriegsrecht” is German for martial law): Henning Krieg just started a new law blog. From his first post and the reputation he’s gathered in the barcamp scene with his sessions on blogging and law, his area of interest is clear: He’s going to blog about online law.
Should be […]
A Swarm of Angels: Thousands not hundreds
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I was thrilled to hear that A Swarm of Angels (the amazing collaborative community-based film project lead by Matt Hanson) is hitting the 1000+ members mark: This also means its time to freeze membership for a little while to guarantee for the necessary stability. Phase 2 out of 5 accomplished!
You can join […]
A Swarm of Angels: Movie Poster Competition
Ever thought of designing a poster? Like, one that’s going to be the official promo material for a real movie? (And a kick-ass one, too!) Well, here’s your chance.
The great independent, collaborative & community-driven film project A Swarm of Angels has started a movie poster competition.
Palla has released his latest stunning image for A Swarm […]
Save net radio, save pandora.com
This email really made me gulp:
Dear Pandora listener,
Today we have some extremely disappointing news to share with you. Due to international licensing constraints, we are deeply, deeply sorry to say that we must begin proactively preventing access to Pandora’s streaming service for most countries outside of the U.S.
It is difficult to convey just how […]
My name is Peter Bihr. I live in Berlin, Germany. As a freelancer, I consult on web strategies, communities, blogging and social media. In this weblog, I jot down random thoughts, ideas and news. Hopefully, you'll find some are interesting for you, too. 