/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ the politics of IP en-us wex@hovir.com 2012-01-12T13:37:16-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/01/12/nate_anderson_vs_the_mpaa.php Apparently the MPAA doesn't like Arts (sic) Technica. Nate Anderson, one of the most stalwart, comprehensive, and fair bloggers of the Copyright Wars takes them apart in little idiot pieces. It's worth reading the whole thing. I've not always agreed with Anderson/ars but I don't think anyone should fault ars or Anderson's work for its quality. One can only hope this will drive more people to read ars.... 75375@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Blink › 2012-01-12T13:37:16-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/01/03/sf_vs_sf_ideas.php Last week I posted on the "where do ideas come from?" perpetual discussion. Today in Boingboing, writer Madeline Ashby has a very nice piece comparing SF (science fictional writing) vs. SF (strategic forecasting) and in particular how to do the latter. Forecasting is about bringing the threads together and making reasonably linear projections and it's worth remembering that things change much more slowly than we expect. Also worth reading is Cory's post from Monday on why science fiction is terrible at prediction.... 75361@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Blink › 2012-01-03T12:03:05-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/12/29/ok_maybe_theres_one_good_thing_about_ebooks.php In today's installment of his "The Big Idea" series, John Scalzi notes that e-books give some authors an opportunity to update older works that they couldn't otherwise revise. When nobody's willing to print an updated edition (it's much cheaper just to reprint), you can still make changes you feel are important for the electronic edition.... 75353@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Blink › 2011-12-29T12:00:44-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/12/29/ok_maybe_theres_one_good_thing_about_ebooks.php In today's installment of his "The Big Idea" series, John Scalzi notes that e-books give some authors an opportunity to update older works that they couldn't otherwise revise. When nobody's willing to print an updated edition (it's much cheaper just to reprint), you can still make changes you feel are important for the electronic edition.... 75353@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Blink › 2011-12-29T12:00:44-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/12/21/scalzi_has_had_enough_of_ebook_price_gripes.php On his blog "Whatever" John Scalzi declares he's tired of his readers griping about the prices of e-books. On the one hand I sympathize with him - it's not like authors have any say in what you get charged for an e-book. And he's right in that having an e-book reader doesn't make you a special snowflake. On the other hand, the fact that a large number of readers are complaining is probably an early warning sign and the response probably should be "Here's who to complain to" rather than "Shut up." I seem to recall a time not too... 75342@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Blink › 2011-12-21T10:13:35-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/12/13/gigaom_catches_up_to_2010.php Sorry for the snark - Gigaom is usually more on the ball than this extremely belated realization that remix culture is now the norm. 2010 was, I think, the year that remix culture hit the mainstrream bigtime. Ingram's column does add one interesting notion: copyright law as the new Prohibition.... 75327@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Blink › 2011-12-13T11:48:24-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/12/02/gaimans_caution_to_authors_get_involved.php More than ever, publishing is not a fire-and-forget activity. This blog entry from Neil Gaiman contains a cautionary tale of an author and a bad e-book experience. He even manages to avoid pimping his own audiobook line too much.... 75307@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Blink › 2011-12-02T15:42:36-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/10/26/gaimans_audible_line_publishes_its_first_titles.php Neil Gaiman blogged last night about the first few titles of his "Neil Gaiman Presents" audiobook line being available. I wrote about this effort this effort back in September when it was first announced. One new-to-me tidbit from the latest post is that Gaiman is not just selecting the titles but is also picking people he thinks will make good readers. An interesting twist, and a natural for audio books.... 75243@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Blink › 2011-10-26T11:13:16-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/10/13/eff_on_facebooks_hotel_california.php Thanks to Cory/Boingboing for pointing me to a nice write-up that the EFF has posted on the effects of Facebook's patent-pending user tracking system. The write-up is concise but contains a bit more scary stuff, not least of which is that Facebook has filed paperwork to form its own PAC.... 75222@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Blink › 2011-10-13T13:41:10-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/10/07/free_copy_of_the_macintosh_way.php Guy Kawasaki (yes, that one) posted that the rights to his book The Macintosh Way have reverted to him and as part of his effort to remember Steve Jobs he is making a PDF of the book available for free.... 75216@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Blink › 2011-10-07T13:02:27-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/10/04/mediashift_on_apple_ebook_collusion_lawsuit.php A nice piece showed up yesterday from Barbara Hernandez on the charge that Apple colluded with e-book publishers. You may recall I wrote about this back in August; Hernandez's piece covers the same basic ground, and goes into a bit more depth on the question of whether or not an agency model is necessary, or whether it's just a big shell game to screw the readers.... 75209@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Blink › 2011-10-04T09:45:02-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/09/30/sharing_is_awesome_two_years_in.php Over at The Big Questions blog, my friend Steve Landsburg (who is himself no slouch at economic math) gives a shout-out to MathOverflow on the occasion of its second year. MathOverflow, and its companion site MathStackExchange, are breaking new ground in public collaboration and shared teaching/learning of mathematics from college level up to the newest theoretical advances. As Landsburg points out, these sites enable problems that might have taken months of work by an isolated individual to be solved in hours. They make this work by a careful combination of openness (anyone can join in) and restriction (MathOverflow really is... 75203@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Blink › 2011-09-30T08:40:35-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/09/29/cbldf_takes_possession_of_cca_seal.php CBLDF (the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund) sent out an announcement saying that they have taken over the intellectual property - including design, merchandising, and promotion - rights around the Comics Code Authority Seal of Approval. This is mostly a free-speech and intellectual freedom story, as the rights were assigned from a defunct entity with little controversy. Still, it's important to remember that intellectual property can be wholly hijacked by the same governments that provide protections like patents and copyrights. If you're not familiar with the CCA Seal story, CBLDF have a very nice summary up on their site.... 75201@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Blink › 2011-09-29T11:21:07-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/08/18/smack_fatality.php The guy who made Minecraft (known as Notch) is being sued by Bethesda games, which is nervous that his planned new game - to be called Scrolls - will infringe on their Elder Scrolls trademark. Rather than go the lawyerly way he's challenged them to a 3v3 two-level Quake 3 frag match, winner take all. (h/t Boingboing)... 75143@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Blink › 2011-08-18T14:03:45-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/06/30/the_need_for_selfpromotion.php John Scalzi's blog is a good read for anyone interested in following a 21st century creator trying to navigate the ever-changing waters particularly around writing. In his blog entry yesterday he took on the question of whether writers should own their own domains. As I noted last week, self-promotion is a big part of the publishing biz these days and owning your own domain is an important part of that, setting you free from potentially capricious and doomed social-network-site masters.... 75075@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Blink › 2011-06-30T14:01:03-05:00