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Many of my budding artist friends appreciate their obscurity problem and want to share their work without the encumbrance of copyright. Yet they are worried about others using it for commercial purposes, the same fear that drives people like Cory Doctorow into the arms of Creative Commons licenses. This idea of somebody else, maybe a [...]

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Slowly, ever so slowly, some of the clear thinking with respect to filesharing and intellectual monopoly (imaginary property, if you will) is filtering into more mainstream channels. I was rather pleased to see these two pieces by Joe Konrath and David Gerrold; both say some excellent things before veering off into the content industry’s Bizarro [...]

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I just read a news post from Tim at CAD-Comic: Apparently, he searched the web for outfit ideas when creating a new character, and inadvertently based one off of some other artist’s painting. Since then it sounds like somebody came after him for “infringement,” and he’s gone back and changed every comic containing the artwork. [...]

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Michael Martin of Pro Blog Design seems like a swell chap, but his recent post on applying the GPL to premium Wordpress themes exemplifies the kind of erroneous thinking I frequently find in the creative community. In trying to apply scarcity rules to infinite goods, he misses out on an opportunity to utilize, rather than [...]

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Even as content industries, patent trolls, and cretins shamelessly abuse their monopoly privileges, some of their behavior filters down to creators with even less to gain from such behavior. The false concepts of idea “ownership” and permission culture are a flesh-melting venom chewing away at our creative body.

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Despite the attempts to elevate it to something tantamount to actual items, so-called “intellectual property” occupies the Land of Make-Believe along with unicorns and elves. Yet the very suggestion that the monopoly privileges associated with IP are invalid raises hackles and provokes fervent responses from the faithful.

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IP apologists like to say that people such as myself who don’t like seeing ads, installing malware on our computers, or paying for copies of an infinite good have a “sense of entitlement” to content. As you might have guessed, I think this is hogwash. Corporations and content creators have gotten used to controlling [...]

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Yesterday people both on- and offline were crowing about how Pink Floyd “won” a legal battle with their record label, EMI. At last, the band can force their fans to buy digital versions of their songs as full albums, rather than individual tracks. Wait, what? This was worth fighting over?

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Remember Ubisoft’s amazing new DRM scheme? The one that would stop all those nefarious “pirates” by forcing legitimate purchasers of Ubisoft games to be constantly online? Yeah, well, it got cracked. Mere hours after the release, at that.

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It looks like a few suits over at Penguin publishing decided to “connect with this whole internet thingy” by turning their eBooks into applications. Because what’s missing when you read a book is a little self-contained social network / entertainment platform. This is the kind of mistake that stems directly from the mistaken idea that [...]

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