EduGlu Sandbox

Matthew Sag of DePaul University College of Law has written a still-evolving and really interesting paper on a couple of the key questions facing copyright law in our digital age.

Mark Twain considered copyright law a licence for publishers to steal from authors and their families and worked tirelessly as an unpaid lobbyist to get Congress to extend the term of copyright beyond the 42 years his own works were protected for.

From the Sunday Times:

The RIAA and MPAA are back in the groove of influencing the continuing expansion of US copyright law, according to Declan McCullough. They're back on the old theme of getting the taxpayer and law enforcement agencies to pick up the tab for chasing peer to peer copyright infringers.

Danny O'Brien has an interesting essay on the confusions of attempting to monetize culture in a digital age in the same way we did it before the internet came along.

With six ISP’s signed up to a UK Government drive to stamp out illegal music downloads everyone is looking for the next big thing in legitimate file-sharing. I met the Grooveshark team earlier in the year when they were in beta. They had a plan to entice users by giving them a share of profits.

William Patry has decided to stop blogging. That is a real shame. His blog has, for the past four years, been one of my first ports of call when difficult copyright issues or cases come round. Where else can you get that depth of experience and analysis freely on tap but the Internet?

From LawFont:

Here's an interesting case - Georgia State University are actually rolling out the lawyers to assert that its online distribution of course material is permitted under copyright law's fair-use exemption.

From Michael Geist: How the U.S. got its Canadian copyright bill