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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Added to the blogroll and to my blog reader:  theParetoCommons, a new group blog about law, policy, and regulation.  According to one of the contributors, Duke’s Kim Krawiec, her colleague Lawrence Baxter “to combine the notion of Pareto efficiency and the complexity of regulating the commons in any industry (financial, environmental, communications, health care, etc.).”  [...]

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It’s out:  “Constructing Commons in the Cultural Environment,” co-authored by me, Brett Frischmann, and Kathy Strandburg, is now available in its final version via the Cornell Law Review website.  (H/T:  CoOp.)   The final version  is also up at SSRN.   A long-ish abstract will be published very soon at the Legal Workshop.
Issue 4 is [...]

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I’m drowning in administrative work, travel, conferences, and the approaching end of the Spring semester, so my posting has been off.  But I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to note Steven Johnson’s essay in the New York Times this morning, writing about the iPhone and the Apple App Store:
For about a decade now, ever since [...]

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Excerpt from a longer video that is accessible here.

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American University law professor and madisonian.net contributor Mike Carroll asked me to post a link to the annual fundraising drive for Creative Commons, where Mike has been a board member since its founding.  Happy to!
Here is Mike’s pitch.  To donate and to read more, click over to the Creative Commons site:
Dear Friends –
I’m asking you [...]

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I am a big fan of the Planet Money series on NPR. Any student struggling with the economic aspects of business associations can use Planet Money and NPR’s other financial series, Marketplace, to get grasp of what is going on. Marketplace tends to focus on the day’s events. PM takes a little time and explores [...]

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Those of us with interests in common property regimes and new institutional economics are buzzing this morning over the news that Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson are being awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics.   Here is the text of the press release:
12 October 2009
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award The [...]

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Or so he reportedly told Teen Vogue in an interview:
Seeing strangers in your designs must be an everyday occurrence for you now. Is it still exciting?
Yes! To me, it’s the greatest compliment. Even when I see a copy, something that’s inspired by something I’ve done, it’s a rewarding feeling. Because that’s why I do what [...]

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I spent last week in Amsterdam, enjoying the city as a result of an invitation to speak at an international conference on urban planning: Morgen/Tomorrow: International Urban Planning Congress Amsterdam. I spoke about Pittsburgh; others spoke about Chicago, Mumbai, London, Helsinki, Rotterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Hamburg, and Tirana. We also heard quite a bit about [...]

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Table of Contents
Editorial

Extending transformation
HTML

TWC Editor

Theory

The labor of creativity: Women’s work, quilting, and the uncommodified life
Abstract HTML

Debora J Halbert

Sex detectives: “Law & Order: SVU”’s fans, critics, and characters investigate lesbian desire
Abstract HTML

Julie Levin Russo

On productivity and game fandom
Abstract HTML

Hanna Wirman

Praxis

Sites of participation: Wiki fandom and the case of Lostpedia
Abstract HTML

Jason Mittell

Identity and authenticity in the filk [...]

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“The Beatles: Rock Band” is due for release a week from today, together with a newly remastered set of  CDs of the Beatles’ albums.   That’s news to just about no one in the entertainment field, whether on the consumer side, the producer side, or the observer side.
The game and the remastered CDs arrive at a fascinating [...]

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This won’t surprise anybody who actually pays attention to the climate of the editing discussions on many wikipedia pages. This blog post notes:
According to the The Wall Street Journal, the survey took place in November of last year, with results being presented last week at a conference in Buenos Aires. A total of 53,888 respondents [...]

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