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Tag Archives: intellectual property

SOPA, Media Conglomerates, and the Moral Obligation to Boycott

01-Feb-12

SOPA, in its current form, is dead. But the fight to keep the internet an open platform for communication, creativity, and commerce is far from over. Pacts like ACTA are in some ways more troubling than SOPA/PIPA, as they represent attempts of copyright extremists to do an end-run around the US Congress. (Rep. Daniel Issa [...]

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Do something about SOPA

13-Dec-11

Hey you! Do something about SOPA and PROTECT IP.. The Stop Online Privacy Act (and its cousin in the Senate, the PROTECT IP Act) are inching closer to passage. Time is running short for you to do what you can to stymie this legislation, which could very well destroy the open internet as we know [...]

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The GPL is for users

02-Sep-11

The General Public License (aka the GPL) is for users. This observation seems so obvious that it needn’t be stated. But for those who develop software licensed under the GPL (like WordPress and most related projects), it’s a fact that should be revisited every now and again, because it has all sorts of ramifications for [...]

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The ethics of Turnitin, or How I Learned To Stop Detecting Plagiarism

04-Sep-09

Yesterday I was feeling sorry for myself with regard to Turnitin and the like. I ended up having an interesting discussion with @LanceStrate, @mattthomas, and @KelliMarshall about the ethics surrounding plagiarism detection service. It got me to thinking about why it bothers me. My gut feeling is this: Turnitin, SafeAssign et al make big bucks [...]

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Doctorow on ethics and copyright

20-May-09

I’m posting this passage from Cory Doctorow’s generally awesome discussion of copyright to Microsoft because it’s too long to tweet: Copyright isn’t an ethical proposition, it’s a utlititarian one. There’s nothing *moral* about paying a composer tuppence for the piano-roll rights, there’s nothing *immoral* about not paying Hollywood for the right to videotape a movie [...]

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What the Facebook debacle says about sharing

17-Feb-09

Allow me to take a few more swings at this dead horse. Mark Zuckerberg, Head Honcho of Facebook, posted a blog entry yesterday about the uproar that followed the Consumerist’s comparison of FB’s old Terms of Service with the new. Luke over at Cac.ophony calls Zuckerberg’s response “totally inadequate”. I think I agree, but I [...]

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Facebook and content

16-Feb-09

The Consumerist published a story yesterday about Facebook’s new Terms of Service. The gist of the changes appears to be something like this. Facebook has always claimed rights to the content that you post there. But there used to be a clause stating that You may remove your User Content from the Site at any [...]

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