2007 August :: Copyright Reform

Translations of this site.

Permalink: http://questioncopyright.org/translations
Posted by Bryan Andrews | Posted in: Syndicated Articles | Comments(0) August 2007

People sometimes translate pages on this site into other languages. Naturally, we encourage this, and you don't even have to ask permission (because making derivative works shouldn't require permission). But if you tell us about a translation you've done, we'll link to it from the original article, and host it if you want.

Recently, Hua Jin made two new translations into Chinese, which gives us a nice excuse to highlight all the translations here. If you know of more, or are interested in doing some yourself, please tell us.

So far we've got:

中文 (Chinese) version of Teaching Music Under Copyright.
中文 (Chinese) version of The Case for the Death of Copyright.
Polski (Polish) version of The Promise of a Post-Copyright World.
Italiano (Italian) version of The Promise of a Post-Copyright World.
(Also hosted here).

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New York University Confuses Filesharing with Plagiarism

Permalink: http://questioncopyright.org/nyu_note_on_illegal_downloading
Posted by kfogel | Posted in: Syndicated Articles | Comments(0) August 2007

We've often written here about how the copyright industry loves to confuse attribution with control of copying. The two are quite different, of course: plagiarism is not the same as the unauthorized sharing of properly-attributed materials. For example, when college students download songs from the Internet, they do not replace the artists' names with their own. The vast majority of shared files are accurately credited, even when the copying itself is illegal.

But the industry knows that the public gets much more upset about misattribution ("Artists deserve credit for their work!") than about illegal copying ("What, I can't share with my friends?"). So industry representatives take the easy route and simply pretend that one is the other.

I hadn't expected to see a New York University associate provost fall for the trick, though. Marilyn McMillan, Associate Provost and CITO at NYU, has published A Note on Illegal Downloading. It starts out with a few paragraphs purely about illegal copying, then takes a turn into truly weird territory...

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Rick Falkvinge’s (Swedish Pirate Party) Bay Area Talks Now Online

Permalink: http://questioncopyright.org/rick_falkvinge_visit_2007
Posted by kfogel | Posted in: Syndicated Articles | Comments(0) August 2007

Portait of Rick Falkvinge

We had the pleasure of bringing Rick Falkvinge, founder of Sweden's Pirate Party, on a U.S. West Coast tour in late July and early August, to talk about copyright reform and civil liberties. The Pirate Party is a political party based on radical copyright and patent reform, and it's started to have an electoral impact in Sweden.

While he was here, CNET News did an interview with him.

Videos of his talks are now available:

Keynote speech at OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (15 minutes), Thursday, 27 July. Note the audience member coming up to the stage right afterwards to press a campaign contribution into Rick's hands!
Stanford University (79 minutes), Tuesday, 31 July (or click here for audio only). This was a particularly good talk, because the audience had excellent questions.
Tech Talk at Google (55 minutes), Tuesday, 31 July. A full presentation of the Pirate Party's platform and strategy
Berkeley CyberSalon (audio only), Sunday, 29 July. A panel discussion entitled "Copyright Reconsidered", with Rick Falkvinge, Anthony Falzone, Mary Hodder, Fred von Lohmann, myself, and Jeff Ubois as moderator.