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New Yorker on the tricky nature of copyright

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There’s a great (long) New Yorker piece this week covering the world of plagarism, copyright, and sampling. In it, Malcolm Gladwell recounts the story of an earlier article that ended up in a hit Broadway play and how in the end, he didn’t feel cheated but instead felt the playwright had created a new work…

Salon.com short story under Creative Commons license

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Evergreen Creative Commoner Cory Doctorow has a new short story out at Salon.com — the first piece ever to run on Salon with a Creative Commons license. (You can see the “some rights reserved” badge here.) Hats off to Cory and Salon — this is an excellent precedent for online publishing.

NPR on political copyright

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Today, NPR’s Morning Edition covered the difficulty in getting public domain speeches by politicans earlier today. Even though a speech is likely in the public domain, recordings by TV Networks retain copyright. It’s a sticky point Creative Commons Chairman and co-founder Lawrence Lessig also argued in a WIRED article a few months ago. [via 90%…

Recent Press — LA Times and SJ Mercury

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Two great articles about Creative Commons recently came out in the press. A story in the Los Angeles Times by John Healey, details how the most recent release of Morpheus, the popular file-sharing network, is able to identify MP3 files marked with Creative Commons licenses (registration required). Yesterday, Dawn C. Chmielewski wrote a story on…

Should I Rip This?

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This flow chart might come in handy the next time you face that insanely complex modern ehtical dilemma: whether to rip a CD or not. (Or, you can just look for a little (cc) Some Rights Reserved and skip all this fuss.) (Via Serendipity.)

Whispers

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I’ve just heard from the curiously named jazz group Whispering Johnson, who have released their latest recordings, The Birthday Numbers, under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. They’ve even gone out of their way to license their sheet music under CC — nice touch. (Which segues into a nice reminder to all you music folk…

Minnesota (Land of My Favorite Rockers)

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Prince. Bob Dylan. Husker Du. The Replacements. Tomorrow morning I head out for Minnesota to give a presentation on Creative Commons at the 32nd annual Museum Computer Network/Minerva Conference — though I’ll be focusing on copyright in the visual arts, not music. (I’ll manage to work The Purple One or The Bard-Turned-Lingerie-Spokesman into the lecture…