Intellectual Property - Articles Archive
from November 2, 2006 to December 7, 2005

Open Source film-making experiment A Swarm Of Angels aims to create a £1,000,000 movie using only digital media, and then release the collaborative effort into the wild, so that it can be remixed and transformed by anyone. This ambitious project sets out to challenge the Hollywood ... read more

A few days ago I had the honour of hosting in my Rome apartment, freedom activist and hacker Richard Stallman, a near-like mythological figure in the world of computing, hacking and a pioneer figure in supporting free software as a political weapon. Wikipedia, which devotes ten pages ... read more

The phenomenon of Internet television is rising many controversies among the supporters and owners of traditional corporate TVs, because of the potentially devastating changes it might provoke in the mass media world. The unstoppable growth of the online social media networks automatically leads internet users ... read more

Participatory media has exploded in recent times, and moves from strength to strength almost daily, with new services arriving and evolving that make communicating easier than ever. But who owns the work you share? We are living through a huge shift away from top-down, one-way mass ... read more

Software Patents Stifle Innovation And Kill Competition In Favour Of A Few. A software patent effectively stifles innovation and ensures that an elite few reap the rewards, while everyone else is left out in the cold. While Copyright, Copyleft and Creative Commons licenses protect authors work in ... read more

Web 2.0 Meets Smartmobs: Howard Rheingold Views On Web 2.0 and How Traditional Mass Media Can Adapt To The Sweeping Changes Generated by New Social Media - Exclusive Interview Howard Rheingold has been very kind in sparing some little time to share his personal views on the ... read more

Network Collaboration is redefining the way we communicate, publish, do business and build collective knowledge, and it has been made possible with the advent of free or affordable peer to peer technologies. Peer to peer, as a term, has often been associated with online file sharing networks, ... read more

Robin Good remix of the P2P file-sharing open-source movie Steal This Film from Sweden's Pirate Bay. Steal This Film (Part One) is a freely available open-source movie about file sharing, Bit Torrent and the news story of the Swedish very popular Pirate Bay torrent tracker. In the ... read more

The Table of Free Voices is an ambitious experiment in bringing over a hundred of the most important thinkers, scientists and humanitarians in the world together, and creating a dialogue between them and a global public. Dropping Knowledge, the non-profit organization behind the Table of Free Voices ... read more

"Pay attention. Practice compassion. ;-) " Recently, science and technology blogger Roland Piquepaille interviewed Howard Rheingold, and asked him a number of questions about the future. Howard, is the author of SmartMobs, a best -selling book about the emerging power of small and large groups of individuals ... read more

It is becoming progressively easier for many users to get precisely what they want by designing it for themselves. Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want, rather than relying on manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect ) agents. Moreover, individual users do ... read more

"Professionals" in any field come in two flavors: Knowledge Sharers and Knowledge Hoarders. The hoarders believe in the value of their "Intellectual Property" (IP). The products of their mind must be carefully guarded lest anyone steal their precious ideas. But let's face it -- if our ... read more

An interesting juxtaposition in the headlines today: as Microsoft announces its launch of a tool to embed Creative Commons content licensing information in works created via Microsoft Office, CNET news covers growing opposition to the way Microsoft is implementing its Windows Genuine Advantage software anti-piracy tools. ... read more

A new, Microsoft-based, online search engine focused on academic subjects is now live. Called Windows Live Academic, it currently indexes content related to computer science, physics, electrical engineering, and related topics (with more than 6 million records from approximately 4300 journals and 2000 conferences) providing direct ... read more

Mac security? DRM protection and trusted computing enabling chip is found to be wired inside the new Intel-based Macs while no official statement, documentation or press release tells consumers about its existence. Paolo Attivissimo reports: I have been silent, up to now, on the new Macs with Intel ... read more

"...the value that publishers and advertisers can gain from considering the value of content endorsed on a person-to-person basis has enormous potential." Content relicensing services provide publishers with steady if somewhat unglamorous revenues from individuals and institutions willing to pay a premium for the rights to redistribute ... read more

I am part of a group of citizens who are concerned about control over digital media. In particular, I am, like others, very worried about proposed laws, regulations and technological systems that will make digital media more expensive, less useful, less diverse and less democratic. This ... read more

Finding the right strategy for dealing with a plethora of platforms for consuming today's content is no easy task. The ideal digital content platform for publishers is not the latest faddish gizmo but the digital objects that they create to run on these hardware platforms. Keeping ... read more

Free software, copyright issues, software patents remain highly important issues to follow and to understand if you are looking into a future where more of the small businesses and professionals will have an opportunity to play in the marketplace with their ideas and inventions. But this may ... read more