Intellectual Property

Quite possibly the coolest visualization ever* -- showing edits to the OpenStreetMap project during 2008.

Click here for details on the project itself. H/T to Eric & Jeff for the link.

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

* I was going to say "the coolest visualization of open source ever," but a) that may not be a very high bar, and b) that sounds ridiculously geeky, even for me....

Looks like Google is serious about that whole "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible" thing.

TechCrunch has the details on a federal-court summary judgement involving Veoh.

The judge's guidelines for what consitutes "reasonable precautions" for a sites that serve up user-posted video seem reasonable. Combined with last week's ruling on fair use, it's almost like there's some sanity emerging in the world of digital copyright...

U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel ruled today that copyright owners must consider "fair use" before alleging infringement and sending take-down notices to YouTube and other video-sharing sites.

At long last, my review of Tarleton Gillespie's book on copyright in the digital era -- Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture -- is done and published in the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies. (Just to be clear, though: The 9-month lag time was due almost entirely to my procrastination, not to RCCR or my editor, David Silver.)

I'll post the review to the articles archive soon, but for now you can find it here -- and see Gillespie's response here.

In reading Wired News' exclusive on a hacker's work against The Pirate Bay for the MPAA, I'm stumped. Which is more ridiculous?

1. That the Motion Picture Association of America, in its mission to fight the theft of Hollywood blockbusters by the Bittorrent crowd, bought stolen information about TorrentSpy.com; or

Has everyone forgotten that copyright exists primarily to encourage the public good that can come from intellectual property? That helping to compensate the content creator is a means for getting good ideas out there, not an end unto itself?

The Wall Street Journal reports today that a coalition of "Internet, media and technology companies" is set to announce... a set of guidelines they have agreed on aimed at protecting copyrights online."

Radiohead's new album, "In Rainbows," dropped early this morning in the band's experiment with DRM-free, digital-only distribution for whatever a fan is willing to pay.

Of course, "DRM-free" also means "super-easy to share."

Jeff Atwood is taking YouTube to task for its wink-wink, nudge-nudge approach to uploading copyrighted video clips.

It's a valid point, and I especially like his quip that "by YouTube's own rules, YouTube cannot exist." But YouTube's copyright tips also qualify as a "big copyright lie" in another sense: they seriously downplay the importance of fair use.

On ars technica yesterday, Nate Anderson wrote about the Computer & Communications Industry Association's "Defend Fair Use" initiative.

It's a nice run-down of the effort by Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Sun, Red Hat, and others to rein in the overly broad copyright notices that accompany sports broadcasts, DVDs and a wide range of other "big media." Toward the end, however, Anderson notes: