Category: General

Siva Viyahadyanathan wrote an excellent introductory book to US Copyright, the DMCA etc a few years back titled Copyrights & Copywrongs. Here he is again with an article on Open Source.

“Abstract: The Open Source model of peer production, sharing, revision, and peer review has distilled and labeled the most successful human creative habits into a techno- political movement. This distillation has had costs and benefits. It has been dif cult to court mainstream acceptance for such a tangle of seemingly technical ideas when its chief advocates have been hackers and academics. On the other hand, the brilliant success of overtly labeled Open Source experiments, coupled with the horror stories of attempts to protect the proprietary model of cultural production have served to popularize the ideas championed by the movement. In recent years, we have seen the Open Source model overtly mimicked within domains of culture quite distinct from computer software. Rather than being revolutionary, this movement is quite conservatively recapturing and revalorizing the basic human communicative and cultural processes that have generated many good things.”

from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=713044

Gara sent me this earlier in the week.

“From CNI – Project Briefing: Spring 2005 Task Force Meeting
Public Domain Art in an Age of Easier Mechanical Reproducibility
Kenneth Hamma
Executive Director, Digital Policy & Initiatives J. Paul Getty Trust

Instead of asserting intellectual property rights in images of public domain works as nearly every art museum does now, it is argued here that publicly and pro-actively placing these images in the public domain and clearly removing all questions about their availability for use and reuse would likely cause no harm to the financial position or trustworthy reputation of any collecting institution and would demonstrably contribute to the public good. As those images have become digital assets and as the preferred delivery venue has become increasingly an electronic network, the ante has been raised to do so. The manner in which this might be done may require consultation with legal counsel. The fact of doing it, however, is not a legal decision but a business decision that can be evaluated by non-profits in measuring success against the mission.”