I’ll be on a panel on Digital Rights Management tomorrow at high noon at the Sundance Film Festival. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a key issue for any company that controls content or has a library it wants to exploit. Balancing issues of copyright/privacy versus profit is no small challenge. In the new digital age,…

Magnatune provides “Internet music without the guilt.” Based in Berkeley, California, Magnatune is a record label with a 21st Century business model, offering consumers a unique mix of free and paid music. One of the first for-profit companies to adopt Creative Commons’ copyright licenses into its strategy, Magnatune has amassed both an impressive buzz and…

A surprise visitor, one Al Gore, dropped in on our landlord and friend Mitch Kapor today, and we commoners took the opportunity to tell the former Vice President about Creative Commons and Science Commons. When Mark Resch presented Mr. Gore with a new Science Commons t-shirt and explained the concept, Gore said that it reminded…

The New York Times continues to write about mash-ups as if they just discovered them. Today a sidebar outlining the history of sampling and mash-ups appears in the Week in Review. Conspicuously missing: The WIRED CD and the current “Fine Art of Sampling” contest. (Negativland gets a mention, though.)

In a long article on piracy and the Chinese economy, the New York Times Magazine’s Ted C. Fishman describes Toyota’s judo-like approach to piracy: don’t fight overwhelming forces head-on; use their momentum to your advantage . . . Another approach to the Chinese intellectual-property regime is to leverage its vitality. The Japanese may be showing…