RIAA:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/opinion/what-wikipedia-wont-tell-you.html
Mike Masnick’s line-by-line reply:  http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120208/01453517694/riaa-totally-out-touch-lashes-out-google-wikipedia-everyone-who-protested-sopapipa.shtml
 
Hat tip to Lauren Gelman.

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There is an interesting blog symposium at Concurring Opinions about Marvin Ammori’s Free Speech Architecture article.  I am participating in the symposium this week, and here is my first post:
Thank you to Marvin for an excellent article to read and discuss, and thank you Concurring Opinions for providing a public forum for our discussion.
In the article, [...]

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Recent readings and reports turn up some provocative examples of what Brett Frischmann, Kathy Strandburg, and I call cultural commons — institutions that enable the structured sharing of knowledge and information rights and resources. The examples illustrate many of the promises and perils of institutions colored by degrees of openness and closure.
From the New York [...]

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Imagine you are a fisherman and haul in a catch with fish that are protected and that would get you in trouble. Quick! Hide it! Deny it! etc., right? Nope. The Times reports that a partnership among fishermen and the Nature Conservancy meant that this fisherman reported the catch so the overall area could thrive. [...]

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From the Shanghai Daily News:
A HONG Kong design student’s tribute to Steve Jobs that generated a buzz online following the death of the co-founder of Apple last week is not original, the teenager said yesterday.
Jonathan Mak, 19, said he was not the first to come up with the design that fits Jobs’ silhouette into the [...]

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At Prawfsblawg, Derek Bambauer has some provocative thoughts about cultural commons that follow up on the “Convening Cultural Commons” workshop that I co-hosted a week ago at NYU, with Brett Frischmann and Kathy Strandburg.
Derek writes:
[T]here was one looming issue that the conferees couldn’t resolve: what, exactly, is a commons?
The short answer is: no one knows. Ostrom’s [...]

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The future of the legal profession is a topic usually reserved for social scientists and legal scholars who focus on the profession itself.  Last Spring, I wrote here that the future of the legal profession is an innovation problem, on a par with the problems that beset the steel industry in the 1960s and 1970s [...]

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The “Constructing Commons in the Cultural Environment” paper and project that I have been working on for some time now with Brett Frischmann (Cardozo) and Kathy Strandburg (NYU) takes a leap forward later this month.  Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom, whose work was our starting point, will be giving a free, public keynote lecture at NYU’s [...]

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I recently returned from our Summer Away program in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  While at the Taos Pueblo, I purchased a pot crafted by an Acoma artist at a small shop.  As I handed the money to the owner, she commented, “This artist has a patent on this design.  No one else can make pots [...]

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But how you free it is another thing… Man accused of hacking millions of papers at MIT (H/T Orin Kerr)

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Free as a verb, not as an adjective.  David Dobbs has an engaging article about publishing and modern science up at Neuron Culture.
It begins:
On Father’s Day three years ago, biologist Jonathan Eisen decided he’d like to republish all his father’s papers. His father, Howard Eisen, a biologist and a researcher at the National Institutes of [...]

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That’s the name of this college kid crafted music blog. Enjoy!

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Eric Johnson has some excerpts and nice commentary about Jonathan Tasini’s lawsuit against the Huffington Post.
For those who haven’t seen it, the argument is that those who have voluntarily submitted published content are now entitled to unjust enrichment damages. This case looks like a loser, and even if it’s not, it should be.

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Taking fan-fic/fan-film to a new level, the creative minds behind the Emmy Award winning Star Wars Uncut have created a crowd-sourced film-making project that has recreated the first Star Wars movie (ie Episode IV:  A New Hope) in 15 second clips contributed by different amateur film-makers.   The project was the brainchild of Casey Pugh [...]

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Via BoingBoing:
“Citation Advantage of Open Access Legal Scholarship”
James M. Donovan
University of Kentucky College of Law Library
Carol A. Watson
University of Georgia Law School
UGA Legal Studies Research Paper No. 11-07
Abstract:
To date, there have been no studies focusing exclusively on the impact of open access on legal scholarship. We examine open access articles from three [...]

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The NYTimes celebrates the five-year anniversary of the International Music Score Library Project with this feature on conflicts between music publishers and students and scholars who want to share the music that is their passion.  On the whole, the story reflects a dialogue among interested parties that is more measured than what we usually hear [...]

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There will be an online symposium on the new book Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property at Concurring Opinions this Tuesday to Thursday (Feb. 1 to Feb. 3, 2011). This book, edited by Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski, is available for free download here, and can also be purchased here. [...]

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That is the title of this article, which does a great job of laying out the pitfalls of what Jonathan Zittrain calls generativity in the context of the Droid. Most people can’t take direct advantage of the generativity themselves, and without a legal framework that gives them rights as consumers they are at the mercy [...]

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If this song can reach just one person…
(Via The SprigMan)

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In a recent article called “How to Build an American Job,” former Intel chairman Andy Grove suggests that there is no neat division between “high-value” design and conceptual work and the “scaling” necessary to bring products to market. He calls on the US to “rebuild our industrial commons,” lest we get locked out of [...]

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