EduGlu Sandbox

Copyright issues remain a source of concern all over the world. Yet, an analysis of the use of copyright-related terminology highlights the differences between countries. In a recent article, I used the free online Google Trends tool which allows tailored analysis of Google Search patterns, both chronologically and geographically. I have since switched to the more powerful and versatile...

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) organizes the Summer and Winter Olympic Games. That also entails promoting the Olympic ideals of international co-operation and the like. Lately, these competitions have become gigantic in scale and expense. While there were only 241 participants (14 countries) in the first Olympics in Athens (1896), the Beijing Summer Olympics had 10,500...

Modern copyright law developed in India gradually, in what we may identify roughly as three distinct phases spanning more than 150 years (1). This article attempts to briefly navigate through the major changes brought in by each successive wave of copyright amendment which have cumulatively resulted in the way Indian Copyright law stands today.(2) <br />
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A proposed new law that restricts access and freedom on Brazilian Internet has passed in the Senate without public scrutiny and is now close to being enforced by the House of Representatives. The law project, created by Senator Eduardo Azeredo, restricts devices like open wi-fi networks, obliges Internet service providers to record and keep user information for three years and allows...

The BBC website reported a break through for advocates of open source software as a U.S. federal court ruled to protect the use of free licences. <br />
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The report states: <br />
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"The US federal appeals court move overturned a lower court decision involving free software used in model trains that a hobbyist put online.<br />
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In its September 4, 2008 issue, the scientific journal Nature published a special section entitled Big Data. It is freely available online (in an enhanced version) for the time-being — no guarantees for the future though. It addresses the many facets of the digital data bonanza taking place in the sciences. Let me briefly review some of these interesting articles.<br />
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Digitisation of books if not whole libraries is all the rage nowadays, especially in the U.S. and Europe. There are several initiatives under way but a lot of questions are being posed regarding copyright, the selection process, how to deal with different editions of books, potential over-dependence on online sources and more...<br />
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Players<br />
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Even though the 1830 Brazilian Criminal Code – enforced eight years after the country became independent from Portugal – foresaw the crime of copyright infringement , the first Brazilian law specifically aimed at authorial protection was the 1898 Law no. 496, also referred as Medeiros e Albuquerque Law, in honor of its author.<br />
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Introduction<br />

When it comes to making print media, the number of options available to grassroots organisations and informal groups can be daunting. Indeed, with the rise of open source software packages, web 2.0 publishing tools, and crowd sourcing sites where one can hire designers for very low prices, the number of options is only increasing. What is exciting about these tools, however, is...

Seven Academic Open-Access Repositories Compared<br />
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The free Google Trends tool offers many possibilities. Let's compare the related concepts that concern us all at iCommons. What do we see when facing off "open source," "copyright," "Creative Commons," "open access" and "copyleft"?

Serbia’s Republic Agency for Telecommunications (RATEL) brought a new Internet and communications monitoring law on Internet traffic interception and redirection. There is strong disapproval from the Serbian Internet community.<br />
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NIN (aka Nine Inch Nails) has released yet another album for free download online. NIN has been doing this for sometime now. They released their album Year Zero for download using Garageband and Logic formats so fans could really get into the nuts and bolts of their tracks and remix them. They also released Ghosts I to IV in a range of options from free downloads to super duper...

When one thinks of terrorist insurgents, the image of young cyber-experts hunched over laptops hardly springs to mind. Not surprisingly, the perception of terrorists has often been more rugged. The global imagination’s terrorist is shrouded and hidden in caves scattered along the far-flung tundra of Middle Eastern borders. His suspected training camps can be traced and monitored...

Over the last few weeks, Viacom and Google have been in the news quite a bit due to their trial. Viacom is suing Google for $1 billion due to the amount of copyrighted material being posted on YouTube (which Google owns).<br />
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Open content, according to the largest open content project Wikipedia, describes "any kind of creative work published in a format that explicitly allows copying and modifying," by anyone and not just by a single organization or individual.

Belgian Music Industry Gets Even Greedier<br />
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From 6-8 June, I was lucky enough to be able to attend a scholarly symposium at UCLA in sunny Southern California: the UCLA/Getty Storage Symposium. Preservation and Access to Archaeological Materials. I live blogged it on the IW&A Blog. Of course, the papers were very specialised and/or technical, and normally only interesting for archaeologists and conservators. However, one issue...

Almost every morning as I drink my first cup of morning coffee I go online to read the news, visit a few blogs (usually the less-than-thought provoking gossip blogs), and scan through my email. Without fail I collect several stories from each of these sources (even the gossip blogs!) relating to the bizarre attempts of various individuals and groups to determine who has the legal...

In the media, mentions of copyright law are invariably coupled with shrill narrations about piracy. Two images are typically conjured in these narratives: Firstly, that of a prosperous national industry going to seed only because of piracy. For instance, the following passage from a thoroughly enjoyable account of piracy in Mumbai:<br />
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A few years ago Juan Palacio, a Spanish software expert, wrote a book and wanted to share it on the Internet as a PDF document. This got him wondering whether it is possible to register the file’s original creator, and after some research he found that in his native country this was not possible unless he printed the book out on paper first. The lack of facilities to register digital...

There seems to be a number of copyright review processes underway these days and thank goodness for that. What strikes me is how important it is that we lawyers keep the process intelligible to the general public despite the tendency and temptation to completely geek out (in the legal sense). Lawrence Liang spoke about this a little in his introduction to the BISA (Brazil, India...

Social networking, blogging, tagging, recommender systems, and other collaborative technologies have changed the face of the Internet, and life as we know it. For sociologists, anthropologists, and even physicists and mathematicians, such services have provided a constant stream of data and information about the lives of millions of people. Like anyone who has observed a visualised...

It's Story Time at iCommons<br />
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This article is an introduction to the BISA Copyright Review project, a comparative project being run by FGV, The Alternative Law Forum and iCommons.<br />
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An Introduction<br />
By Lawrence Liang<br />
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How many web search engines actually allow to filter for Creative Commons-licensed materials? How many websites allow you to search for CC-licensed images only? How about videos and audio materials? I did a quick survey of a number of (English-language) websites.<br />
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In early May 2008 the Delhi High Court, through an opinion authored by Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul, issued a decision in a case involving a nude painting by the renowned artist Maqbool Fidaq Husain (best known as MF Husain). Born in 1915 to a Muslim family in the state of Maharashtra, MF Husain is a highly acclaimed artist who many consider to be the father of modern Indian art and...

Despite interesting movies and efforts, in Colombia no film industry in the true sense of the word has really evolved. During the 80's a public institution, Focine, provided support for some productions but it was not viable financially and had to declare bankruptcy during the 90's. In 2003 the "Film Law" (Ley 814 de 2003) offered important incentives, in the form of tax deductions,...

How many times have you seen a pair of designer shoes or the perfect summer dress, or the most exquisite suit in a magazine, with a price tag that makes your eyes water? And how many of you have gone out the next day, and found the shoes, dress or suit in the same shape and style for a fraction of the price? How many times have you hauled out the jeans or shirt that have been hanging...

Snapshots of Belgian landmark building require copyright clearance<br />
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Sharing heritage digitally is becoming more and more commonplace. In the past few years alone, a new awareness has emerged of the value of digital sharing. The National Endowment for the Humanities has initiated a new Digital Humanities Program, which awarded over $1 million in 2007. The Society for American Archaeology’s annual conference in Vancouver in March saw twice as many...

Open Access - feasting on knowledge like manna<br />
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Siyavula is an ambitious project that aims to transform education in South Africa by providing free, open and curriculum-aligned educational resources. Siyavula means ‘we are opening’ in Nguni and is an apt description of the initiative that will provide content via an online portal where educators can collaborate and create resources, leveraging Creative Commons licenses.<br />

The founders of the Digital Standards Organization recently convened in The Hague to develop a declaration that calls on governments to further the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with a commitment to the adoption of open standards.<br />
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In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court of Colombia, the highest criminal judicial tribunal and Cassation Court (deals with the Cassation procedures also known in other juridical traditions as right of appeal on points of law), determined that in order to establish a criminal violation of copyright, it is necessary to find if the criminal conduct is for profit-making, if it causes...

More and more museums and other cultural heritage organizations are offering online access to their holdings. These initiatives are varied in scope, depth and target audience. They also take different approaches to copyright and open access, esp. regarding photos of art and artifacts in their care.<br />
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Nine months before YouTube's launching, another online videos service was being born: Videolog.tv, a Brazilian website that was built on an open business model. Mostly used by people connected to local young urban cultures, like skaters, filmmakers and Parkour practitioners, Videolog is now increasing the bet it has always placed on community issues.<br />
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A Closer Look at South Africa’s Social Media Construction Capacity <br />
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In alignment with its historical track record of promoting access to knowledge and the values of openness and scholarship, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina added another landmark to the scene of Access to Knowledge that places special emphasis on the Arab region.<br />
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“The creative act is not performed by the artist alone the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives a final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists.” <br />
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There's good news for scientists, researchers, students and fans of evolution all over the world - the Darwin Online project, run by Cambridge University and the Charles Darwin Trust are working on putting copies of all of Darwin's published notes, letters and manuscripts into a free online repository, open to anyone who is interested. <br />
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Commoners are, on the whole, a thoughtful bunch, and we like to read and think about important stuff, like intellectual property and democracy and the global commons and global policy and beer and, you know, stuff. <br />

The Social Web (aka Web 2.0) is about three things: listening, conversing and sharing. Of the three, sharing is perhaps the most relevant in the context of the Commons in part because it is about sharing content, something that is almost taken for granted these days. Anyone who is active on the Social Web is familiar with a myriad content sharing sites ranging from Flickr (photo...

This month, iCommons’ resident copyright columnist, Tobias Schonwetter, offers his view on a recent US court decision which reassigned the copyright in Superman-related works to the family of one of the original creators.<br />
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The upcoming iSummit '08 promises to be an event that will bring together leaders in digital innovation from around the world to talk about, and mobilise themselves around developing and sustaining free culture on the Internet. <br />
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This is the story of the tropical reinvention of "Captain Copyright", a cartoon superhero who was supposed to devoted his life to teaching children the virtues of copyright. Captain Copyright was the brainchild<br />

Inspired by Japanese innovation and hosted in Sapporo, the iSummit ’08 logo was carefully crafted to reflect the traditional culture of its host country, as well as the energy and spirit of the meeting of Internet activists from around the world. The logo incorporates the traditional Ainu design element of morew (pronounced mo-le-oo) a swirl pattern used frequently in Ainu wood...

This has typically been the ending question for any Creative Commons-related conversation in the Middle East that I have been involved in. While drawing on others' experiences and telling success stories from other parts of the world would seem a very appealing answer, there is always the “but here, it does not work like that” aspect of the argument. Well, today I think we have...

In celebration of World Book Day, on April 23 2008, iCommons asked members of the community to list some of their favourite Open Literacy projects. From computers that talk back, to teaching materials, the following projects are an excellent example of the useful, tangible, and exciting projects that are making the magic of reading accessible to people all over the world. Many...