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Google+So, the AP has in the past made a big deal about holding on to the rights to every tiny little bit of what they right (essentially denying that fair use even exists). Who better than those snarky peeps at Woot to call them on the implications of such a scheme?
Yearly Archives: 2010
The marketplace of ideas
Intellectual property, despite the name, doesn’t quite work like regular property. A look at intellectual property markets highlight problems with a pure free-market approach that aren’t necessarily visible with other markets.
The new world of self-publishing: it’s not just for vanity anymore!
It’s finally possible–although still hardly likely–to skip the traditional publishers altogether, publishing yourself (via Amazon, for example), and get discovered by fans directly.
Why not an open-access Law.gov to access public legal materials?
Carl Malamud’s vision of a new Law.gov “would give public easier access to all kinds of documents” — and not force us to rely on LexisNexis and Westlaw for access to what is, after all, public material.
Looking forward to reading the new Adrian Johns book
So illustrious a source as the Fred von Lohmann at the Electronic Frontier Foundation recommends the new book by Adrian Johns.
Was medieval Islamic culture inhospitable to science?
Myth #4 in Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion is Syed Nomanul Haq’s article entitled “That Medieval Islamic Culture was Inhospitable to Science.”
Modern Islam and science: an article by Seyyed Hossein Nasr
In “Islam and Science,” an article written for the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, Nasr attempts to give a broad overview of the relationship of Islam to modern science and technology. He makes some key points regarding to criticism of Western science from an Islamic point a view.
Copyright and the public domain
Randy Picker has a fascinating post on the Faculty Blog of the University of Chicago’s law school of the copyright status of scans (by Google, for example) of public domain works. Does the effort of digitizing the work qualify as enough original effort to create a new copyright?
Popper, Kuhn, and Creationism
Since at least McLean v. Arkansas in 1981, Creationists — Christian fundamentalists who oppose evolution — have turned, intriguingly, to philosophy of science to try to justify the inclusion of Creationism alongside evolution in science classrooms.
Google attorney dislikes ACTA too
The still-in-draft Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, beloved of some, is hated by many–including Google, apparently.
Should mandatory open access be extended to all federally funded research?
A consortium of research institutions is lobbying to extend the NIH open-access policy to other federally funded research.
The FCC re-classifies in response to Comcast
Last month, Comcast won its appeal in a federal appeals court in D.C. against the FCC’s attempt to require network neutrality. As predicted by some, the FCC is proceeding with plans to reclassify broadband providers, and thus escape the ruling entirely.
Causation, faith, and intelligent design
There is a philosophical thesis (attributed jointly to Pierre Duhem and Willard Quine) that, when simplified, explains how a given set of facts can produce more than one apparently true conclusion: essentially, different background assumptions lead to different conclusions. A related concept is known as underdetermination: that a given set of evidence can be explained by more than one–potentially conflicting–theory.
Some commonalities of pro- and anti-vaccination rhetoric
Within the context of the contemporary vaccination debate, neither side has a monopoly on a particular kind of argument.
The Stored Communications Act and you
It’s always good to remember that storing your email on someone else’s server is a potential problem.
The splintering of the Internet is not a new phenomenon
There has been increasing discussion around the concept of the “splinternet”: that proprietary devices like the iPad or proprietary sites like Facebook are acting to splinter the old, connected Web into discrete, fragmented, and self-contained units. But the “golden age” was hardly golden, and today’s Web is, if anything, better than it used to be in terms of interconnectivity. Certainly it’s important to recognize fragmentation issues today, but let’s not pretend it’s a new problem.
