Credit: Brent and MariLynn [CC BY] Mike Masnick questions the word “balance” in the copyright debate: I’ve long thought that balance is the wrong way to look at it. The purpose of copyright law is to incentivize the creation of new content, and thus the standard on which copyright law […]
Free Software
95 posts
One of my closest friends, Pat Lee, has a webcomic, The Fantastical Adventures of Caspian the Sea-Devil. The “about” section contains this fantastic gem on art and originality: This comic, like all comics, consists of written and drawn elements. The written element, the story, will be somewhat guided by my […]
I submitted the following to the Canadian Copyright Consultation, a little hastily as midnight approached on the initial deadline. It’s built off the same notes I used to speak from at the townhall. Copyright matters to me for a variety of reasons. I’m a musician, writer and programming. I was […]
This post originally appeared on the CC Labs Blog This past year was my last at the University of Toronto, making this summer my last chance to participate in the Google Summer of Code. I searched hard for a project and mentor organization that would suit my interests, and when […]
This post originally appeared on Techdirt. The Associated Press’ attempt to DRM the news is a bad idea for a variety of reasons, but its claims for the news registry’s capabilities seem pretty misguided, once you examine the technology behind it (the “magic DRM beans”). Ed Felten dug into the […]
My Google Summer of Code project is divided into two phases: updating and then upgrading the Creative Commons Drupal module. The module was largely abandoned as it was being developed Drupal 4.7.x, and now Drupal 6.x is the current series (with 7.x under development). The first phase is to update […]
Just posting a quick fix to a problem I had with using 7z to extract an archive. I could list the contents of the archive, but any attempts to extract gave an “Unsupported Method” error. Dan Jacobson posted a solution to the debian bug tracking system, which is to install […]
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 […]
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 […]