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I haven’t talked about Creative Commons in a while. Last night I went to the London CC Salon, which turned out to be a sort of pep rally for free culture – not a bad thing.

One of the films shown is embedded below (or watch it on YouTube) and makes for a pretty funky introduction to the concepts behind CC. The video is one of the many pieces of CC-licensed work included on Free Me, a DVD created to show off and promulgate the CC ethos. Eventually, it is intended to be sent to…

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Steve over at the Gilbane Publishing Practice Blog has a long post on the experiences of the the We Are Smarter Than Me project. We>Me, which I wrote about last year, is (was?) a project by MIT, Pearson and others to build a community to write a book about how building communities could help businesses. The results, as Gilbane tells it, are interesting.

Firstly, it became clear to the steering committee that they had to relinquish all control of the project to the community in order for the community to flourish. There can be…

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This week saw the first meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Publishing at the UK Houses of Parliament. The APPG was set up last month, largely on the instigation of Sonny Leong, who is chairman of the IPG, a body which does an excellent job of representing independent publishers in the UK (full disclosure: my employer is a member, but that’s a personal opinion). It’s great that indie publishers will have such a voice in the house, although the APPG was set up to communicate with the industry as a whole.

The chairman of the APPG…

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One of the many things we missed while we were away was the appearance of Forbes Magazine’s special Books edition. It’s right on the ball, with a number of fascinating articles from the people who really know what they’re talking about, so you’ve got the Institute for the Future of the Book’s Ben Vershbow on The Networked Book, Boingboing’s Cory Doctorow on giving books away for free, and UC’s Jonathan Enfield on new challenges to copyright. It’s a really good selection, and all the commentators seem to be saying the same thing: technology is coming, but…

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The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property is published today as part of the UK’s pre-Budget report, and is now available as a downloadable pdf from the Treasury website (which, it must be said, is a joy to use, right down to the lovely red box favicon).

The Gowers review is a year-long independent review of intellectual property rights in the United Kingdom commissioned by Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown and lead by former FT-editor Andrew Gowers. It’s the first action in some time on Britain’s somewhat untypical copyright laws, and is particularly interesting when various…

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Currently all over the blogs: think tank calls for ‘private right to copy’. If you didn’t know already, every time you rip a CD to your computer, and then copy that MP3 to your portable player, you’re breaking several copyright laws. Clearly these laws are out of date and ineffectual, but that doesn’t stop the various industry bodies involved from pushing to tighten them up rather than rewrite them.

The news now, of course, is all about music, but the same arguments apply to books. Soon, ebooks will allow you to ‘rip’ your books to other portable devices,…

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With all my recent ranting about Digital Rights Management (DRM), I thought I should post some of the reasons for the unrest. Then I came across BoingBoing‘s Cory Doctorow advertising the course he’ll be teaching at UCLA this semester. It’s called “Pwned: Is everyone on this campus a copyright criminal?” and the course description sums up the potential dangers of DRM better than I would:

Every garden has a snake: computers aren’t just tools for empowering their owners. They’re also tools for stripping users of agency, for controlling us individually and en masse.

It starts with “Digital Rights

…

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