WaPo on the Myanmar Internet Crackdown

Roby Alampay nails some of the key issues related to Internet governance and international law in an editorial today in the Washington Post. It’s well worth a read, especially if you’ve been following the Myanmar crackdown. Alampay also makes a key link: the issue of Internet access should be perceived to be a human rights … Read more

Three Conversations on Intellectual Property: Fordham, University of St. Gallen, UOC (Catalunya)

Three recent conversations I’ve been part of offered a contrast in styles and views on intellectual property rights across the Atlantic. First, the Fordham International IP conference, which Prof. Hugh Hanson puts on each year (in New York, NY, USA); the terrific classes in Law and Economics of Intellectual Property that Prof. Urs Gasser teaches … Read more

Eric von Hippel in Internet, Law and Politics

Prof. Eric von Hippel has written one of my favorite books: Democratizing Innovation. Prof. von Hippel teaches at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and runs the Innovation Lab there. Our class of Harvard Law School students focused on Internet, Law and Politics have created a wiki page of questions for Prof. von Hippel in advance … Read more

iTunes and EMI Breaking the DRM Barrier

Good news from Steve Jobs, Eric Nicoli, and company: EMI’s music now to be available without Digital Rights Management. A great move for consumers, innovation, interoperability and, one hopes, creative re-use of digital works. (Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing has the definitive post and list of links. Cory suggests that we help out with a … Read more

Viacom Believes Fewer Than 60 Take-Down Mistakes

I’ve been e-mailing with Michael Fricklas of Viacom since I posted about Jim Moore’s home video that got caught in Viacom’s 100,000 take-down push on Friday. Mr. Fricklas wrote to me a few times during their process of assessing how many errors they made out of 100,000. Today, he wrote: “… we’re achieving an error … Read more

Another Video for the Put-Back-Up List?

As with Jim Moore’s video — now famous thanks to Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing — you can decide for yourself whether Viacom’s cease-and-desist letter should have resulted in Jaegercat’s video being taken down at YouTube. In an e-mail from .sg, (which she said I could republish), Jaegercat writes: “My video ‘Beat Police’, an original … Read more

A Voice from Outside the US on the Viacom-YouTube Matter

“Jaegercat” writes in a discussion board on this topic: “I don’t live in the US. I’ve already responded with the counter-notification via fax, but I have no idea how to proceed from here if they don’t respond. The video that they pulled was an original work that took me around 5 months to make, that … Read more

What's the "Day 2" Story on the Viacom-YouTube Tussle?

Google News suggests that there have been about 500 stories so far written in this news sources that they scan on the topic of Viacom’s 100,000 take-down notices to YouTube users. Most of the stories focus on the business dynamics of the matter, understandably: 1) why Viacom did this; 2) the possibility (or likelihood, or … Read more