A few weeks ago, I started my Google Summer of Code project with the Creative Commons. My proposal to update the CC Drupal module was accepted back in April, and over the last six weeks I’ve been getting my bearings. Kevin Reynen from Denver Open Media, the project’s maintainer, has […]
Yearly archives: 2009
This post originally appeared on Techdirt. Despite claiming to represent the interests of songwriters and composers, ASCAP has consistently provided bad advice on how they should respond to digital technology and the internet. For ASCAP and many other collection societies, anything that doesn’t involve royalties seems automatically bad (despite all […]
My website was recently migrated to a new server, and since then I haven’t been able to automatically upgrade WordPress plugins via FTP. Tonight I chased down the error. I could login via FTP from the command line, but WordPress kept telling me I had the wrong username/password. I found […]
This post originally appeared on Techdirt. Howard Knopf, a well known Canadian copyright expert, recently took a look at some of the failed copyright levy proposals in Canada. The Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC) administers the tax levy on blank CDs, which now accounts for almost 90% of the price. […]
I’ve been using the Openmoko Neo Freerunner as my mobile phone for over two months now. The phone can run a variety of software distributions. I started off with the Om 2008.12 Update, but spent the first few weeks testing out other popular distributions: FDOM, SHR, Qt Extended and finally […]
This article originally appeared on Techdirt. In the April 2009 issue of Entertainment Law & Finance, three partners in the Intellectual Property Group at Kilpatrick Stockton LLP take a look at the role that “amateur musicologists” have played thus far in the copyright battle stemming from Satriani’s lawsuit against Coldplay […]
This article originally appeared on Techdirt. Greg Gillis (aka Girl Talk) recently participated in a live chat as part of a Download Decade series run by the Globe and Mail. Gillis makes music entirely from samples, combining existing songs in creative ways to make something new. His last album, which […]
This article originally appeared on Techdirt. It’s widely known that internal staff are the biggest threat to IT security, but what about your computer repairman? After a hard drive was stolen from Real Living Action Realty in Pennsylvania, the company called Kevin Andrew Lutes, who had done repair work for […]
Last July, I asked, why doesn’t Girl Talk allow commercial use? Girl Talk (Greg Gillis) makes commercial use of samples from all sorts of artists for his own music, yet he uses a Noncommercial Creative Commons license himself. Though, he points out that anyone else could use his material commercially, […]