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. […]
Blaise Alleyne
314 posts
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, […]
This post originally appeared on Techdirt. We’ve been hearing a lot about “cyberbullying” lately. Cases like the Lori Drew incident have got politicians and teachers all over looking to pass vague new rules and laws (or twist existing ones) to punish behavior they feel is wrong. The problem is, no […]
Adam Thierer’s reaction essay appeared in the Cato Unbound debate on Friday, Code, Pessimism, and the Illusion of “Perfect Control.” He argues that the basis for Lessig’s pessimism in his book, Code, was his illusory belief that code provides a mechanism for “perfect control.” While he levies some strong criticisms […]
This post originally appeared on the UofT Students for Life blog. I’m not usually a fan of any pro-life arguments that focus on potentiality, because it tends to obscure the fact that from the moment of conception we’re dealing with actual life (and just potential growth)… but that caveat aside, […]