There’s a bill currently being debated in the US Senate, called the INDUCE act (here’s a good background on it), that aims to criminalize P2P networks, programmers, software compnaies, and anyone else that can be shown to help “induce copyright infringement.” Many law observers have criticized the act’s broad language, but the Future of Music…

Slashdot is carrying a great interview with the founder of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is only about three and a half years old, but in that time it has already grown well beyond the size of most standard printed encyclopedias. In the interview, Jim Wales talks about how they manage all that content, how they collect and…

A recent trade agreement between Australia and the US included a provision that extended Australia’s copyright from 50 years after author death to 70 years, to match US Law. There was speculation that Project Gutenberg Australia would suffer, and it looks like it officially has. Take a look at this list of authors that were…

The File Sharing Experiment is a project with the goal of demonstrating how file sharing actually helps the music, movie, and software industry. Folks are encouraged to post purchases they’ve made and a short explanation of how they learned about the band/movie/game and why they ended up buying something for it. All the evidence is…

Dan Gillmor’s book, We the Media, is now available for download as a PDF, under a Creative Commons license. We recently threw a book launch party for it and the audio versions of the book are already starting to be recorded by fans and readers.

With the advent of various news gathering services, there’s been a recent trend to produce visualizations to make sense of the information deluge. So far I’ve seen this flash representation of Google News, a Java representation of NewsIsFree, and this interesting timeline-based topic view of Google News, also in flash. A completely different view on…

Brad Neuberg has discovered a CC licensed street mural in San Francisco, California: Check out Brad’s post for more pictures. No kidding! The Market Street Railway Mural is at 300 Church Street in San Francisco. More from the muralist and the Market Street Railway.

A few days ago we had a very successful book launch party for Dan Gillmor’s We, the Media at our new offices. Several attendees blogged the party: JD Lasica Dan Gillmor Brian Dear Marc Canter Leave a comment if I missed one.

Last month Norman Walsh started using a Creative Commons license for his essays (consistently informed and provocative on XML, Semantic Web, and other technical topics) and photographs. Norm does us the favor of explaining his choice: When I started writing this collection of essays, I slapped on a quick copyright statement asserting “All Rights Reserved.”…

Jessamyn runs librarian.net, a blog exploring issues in library science and within American libraries, and is currently one of the select few webloggers covering the Democratic National Convention . In addition to all her daily posts, her access allows her to share photos from within the convention, and all of it is available for reuse…