Planet Money has a gem of a story on ‘the Business Secrets Of The Amish‘. The story zooms in on how the Amish, who have made their living through small plot farming for centuries, have adapted to an environment that does not allow for this lifestyle anymore: What you see in this hall is the [...]

turns out that theverge does music reporting of sorts. their recent history of dubstep music (‘beyond lies the wub‘) contains two short passages that highlight the impact of digital technology on art (in this case dubstep music). The first passage highlights how digital piracy killed the music industry might have actually driven the quality of [...]

So i finally managed to start reading the ‘Future of Copyright‘ anthology that contains the winning essays from a contest organised by the Modern Poland Foundation. So far (i have not read them all) my favourite essay is ‘Give‘ by Togi, which i read as powerful argument that systemic change (and not just reform) is [...]

earlier this week i found myself in the bathtub reading through this list of voting recommendations by the ‘Audiovisual Coalition/EP CULT Committee‘ on the ‘Proposal for an orphan works directive’. The voting list makes voting recommendations with regards to amendments (proposals to change the text of the proposed directive) suggested by various Members of the [...]

Stumbled across this little hidden gem in an interview on ‘Tendencies and stakes of copyright’ that Lorena Boix Alonso (Deputy Head of Cabinet of Neelie Kroes) gave to the Forum D’Avignon (emphasis mine)c: For example, according to recent studies many consumers are confused about what they are allowed to copy or record concerning content leading [...]

so one of the more memorable moments of this mornings rather dystopian ICT and management of creative content session at the Digital Agenda Assembly came when the representative from EMI publishing tried to make an argument by stressing that consumers can already buy music via iTunes under clear terms. In reaction to my interruption that [...]

… or at least way too long. Ben White of the British Library gave a really good illustration of this during his presentation at the EuropeanaConnect workshop on Extended Collective Licensing that took place in Luxembourg over the last two days. On one of his slides he showed the results of a recent study on [...]

had a bit of a deja-vu this morning when browsing through the economics section of friday’s NRC Handelsblad: Page two of that section contains a full page article (‘free jukeboxes against piracy’) on music streaming services such as spotify.com (click to enlarge, no online version available): As you can see from the photo above, the [...]

not sure why this is happening, but it appears that commons sense is slowly starting to make a comeback in the discussion about copyright. Yesterday we had the British Prime Minster announce that his government is undertaking a review of the parts of the intellectual property laws in order to enable more flexible use of [...]

In the light of yesterday’s rather confusing and unconstructive discussion about ‘risks and rewards’ at the Europeana ‘open culture 2010‘ conference, i thought that it might be useful to clarify a number of things. If you take a step back from form your favourite grief about copyright/public funding and look at the larger picture the [...]