One of the three things I learned from my economics & politics degree (I’ll tell you the other two some other time) is neatly summarised by the following stat: out of said three-year degree, we spent one week learning how the free market worked, and the remaining time learning about all the ways in which it doesn’t.
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There is a reason US copyright law is sometimes “affectionately” known as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act; there is a strange coincidence at play here – every time the copyright on Walt Disney’s early creations is about to expire, US copyright terms get magically extended by another few years. Currently, a work is under copyright both in the US and the UK for 70 years after the author’s death. This might make sense for Disney–at least someone is still making money from Walt’s creations–but for the vast majority of creative works out there, this lengthy copyright term is an issue.
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Have you heard of Creative Commons (CC)? Well, you’ve almost certainly benefited from it.
When was the last time you read something on Wikipedia? The vast majority of content on Wikipedia is under a Creative Commons license, which is what makes it legal for you to use the material, copy it, distribute it, build on it, and do pretty much whatever else you can think of with it – within certain guidelines.
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Amazon’s Kindle has been the 2010 Christmas rage, but the DRM limitations on the product are endlessly infuriating. The adverts trying to tell me that I can read my Kindle books on any device are incredibly misleading: you can read your ebooks on your desktop and your laptop and your Kindle and your iPhone and your Android phone, because there’s a Kindle app for all of them. But what, dear Amazon, happens if I want a Sony e-reader, or if my laptop happens to run on Linux? In effect, tough beans.
Read more at ORGZine.

Just over a fortnight ago, it was alleged that the FBI paid developers to put backdoors into the OpenBSD operating system. This story–and OpenBSD’s response to the allegations–serves to highlight the importance of open source software.
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About six months ago, when the Digital Economy Bill became the Digital Economy Act, I decided to try a little experiment: for a year, I was going to live without the BPI. That meant not buying any music released on a BPI-affiliated label, or downloading any such music – if I was going to do this, I was going to do it by the book.
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A few weeks ago Cooks Source, a small for-profit magazine, published a piece on medieval apple pie recipes by Monica Gaudio. They had picked up the piece from a website Gaudio had published it on and neglected to inform her that they were using her writing, or to compensate her. When the writer complained, the Cook’s Source editor responded with the claim that everything published on the Internet is in the public domain.
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I was both amused and puzzled by the recent news that Amazon is to allow book lending on the Kindle. At first glance this is great news: e-books will finally match some of the basic functionality available in the dead-tree format! At least this move shows that the content industry is beginning to get its collective head around some of the problems created by locking down and controlling users’ devices and the content they have paid for.
Read more at ORGZine.