All in Copyright

Do Health Data and Metadata Ownership Licenses Help or Hurt Innovation?

We see how the current web of licensing agreements is hobbling cable TV operators as they find themselves having to compete more and more with web based streaming services. Isn’t it also possible that similar restrictions regarding health data and metadata might provide similar challenges to creating new and beneficial products and services from shared data?

When Does a Public Data Good Become a Private Data Resource?

It may be that the greatest challenge facing private entrepreneurs in developing new and valuable information products and services based at least partially on public data will be public resistance to paying for information, no matter how new, innovative, or unique these producrts or services are.

Higher Education Act Reauthorization Requires Colleges to Subsidize Copyright Anti-Piracy Efforts

If you have recently written a check to pay college tuition for the coming semester, you will be interested to know that, if Congress has its way, part of the money you spend on your child’s college education will now be going to subsidize college-based copyright enforcement and anti-piracy efforts.

Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.

Craig Thomler’s Make government data freely available neatly lays out, from an Australian’s perspective, a discussion of how the public can benefit if government agencies make raw data available for access by individuals and organizations who then analyze or present that data in a useful way. These points are from Thomler’s conclusions:

Social Data Portability, Privacy, and DRM

When Bob Weber published his post-CES DRM 3.0 Has Arrived he made the point that, while DRM for music may be dying, the entertainment industry’s interest in Digital Rights Management is still quite strong. This got me to wondering whether this “next generation DRM” might have some relevance to current interest in social network portability.
I'm listening to another one of Command Line's podcasts, this time Rant: Is Fair Use a Right? (Command Line produces one of my five favorite podcasts.) Despite the logical nature of Command Line's thesis (he believes that copyright Fair Use is a "right," not just a legal defense) I'm still skeptical about being able to unambiguously explain to people what their "fair use" rights actually are.