Library Manifesto

Friday, January 8th, 2010 Posted in Civil Liberties, Humanities, Intellectual Property | No Comments »

A friend of mine is a librarian, specifically a law librarian.  She posted a link on Facebook to an article about appreciating librarians.  It spawned a pro-librarian rant from me that I thought I would blog about ( and include ...

Richard Stallman came to Vancouver, and I upset him

Thursday, February 19th, 2009 Posted in Civil Liberties, Information Technology, Intellectual Property | 6 Comments »

Richard Stallman was in Vancouver two weeks ago.  He performed, if I may describe his lectures like that, three times; I caught the first.  I asked Stallman a question after it was over, and thoroughly annoyed him.  I know that ...

What would you call open-source marketing?

Friday, December 26th, 2008 Posted in Business Law, Communications, Information Technology, Intellectual Property | 5 Comments »

President-Elect Barack Obama raised $264.5M through April 30, 2008, thrice that raised by his opponent, Senator John McCain. Studies at the FEC, The Campaign Finance Institute, The Center for Responsive Politics , George Washington University, indicate that a massive ...

EU suggests reason and logic behind ACTA

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 Posted in Civil Liberties, Information Technology, Intellectual Property | No Comments »

I've just finished reading the ACTA Fact Sheet, updated November 2008.  Here is some preliminary information: ACTA is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The subtitle "Fact Sheet" is footnoted, "This fact sheet purports ...

New ways of looking at video game IP

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 Posted in Information Technology, Intellectual Property, Video Games, Virtual Worlds | 1 Comment »

I suggested the other day that we use video games as the industry in which to consider hybrid IP for software. I suggested this because video game software, more than any other kind of software, still retains the elements that were ...

Software IP and Games – which model applies?

Friday, December 5th, 2008 Posted in Information Technology, Intellectual Property, Video Games | 2 Comments »

At the moment, video games, because they are software, are covered by copyright.  But traditionally, games were covered by patent. Hmm.  I've argued before that software should be sui generis, governed by a hybrid model of patent and copyright: The Source Door: ...

Are there benefits to “piracy”?

Thursday, November 6th, 2008 Posted in Business Law, Information Technology, Intellectual Property, Video Games | 1 Comment »

The pro-copyright, pro-DMCA, anti-counterfeit lobby groups would have you believe that all unauthorized reproduction (and distribution), colloquially known (inaccurately) as piracy, is horrid for the industries concerned, and is destroying them.  They go so far as to call it theft, ...

Alternatives to C-61, part II

Thursday, August 28th, 2008 Posted in Information Technology, Intellectual Property | No Comments »

Here's the rest of that post: GOALS The goal of any legislation is to balance concerns of interested but competing parties, and to approach this balance, as much as possible, with a public interest bias. The concerns were these:

Alternatives to C-61: Statutory concerns for the protection and encouragement of creative works

Sunday, August 24th, 2008 Posted in Information Technology, Intellectual Property | 1 Comment »

I want to suggest an alternative paradigm to the statutory regime for creative works as intellectual property, a.k.a. copyright.  I'm not going to get into detailed explanations of the existing Copyleft and other alternative paradigms to copyright.  But I'm going ...

Hedy Fry’s Copyright Balance

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 Posted in Intellectual Property, Privacy | No Comments »

The electoral district in which I live is called "Vancouver Centre."  My elected representative is the Honourable Member of Parliament, Dr. Hedy Fry.  Dr. Fry is something of an activist; she has always been an outspoken representative of her constituents.  ...