A World of Open » Upcoming

Tangled in Legal

Peter Troxler — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:21:38 +0000

The (business) world is looking for protection of ideas: patents, copyright, trade marks, licenses, rights management — legal instruments pretending to preserve the opportunity of exploitation to the original inventor, author, creator, giving them the opportunity to sue anybody taking — stealing! — intellectual property and turning it profitably into a business.

Is that how the world, how business works? In this opinion peace I propose that copyright owners too often and too easily get tangled in the prospects of easy legal protection, spending time, money and energy on something that is most probably less efficient than any attempt at selling the stuff themselves.

Due to be out in 2010.

Registries and the Public Domain

Peter Troxler — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:41:04 +0000

How can a potential user determine if a work is actually in the public domain? What involves substantial detective work could become an easy task in the future, if some of the initiatives on certification and registration of works will come to fruition. A session at the 2008 Communia Workshop in Amsterdam discussed the need for tools that can be used to mark and tag works supposedly being in the public domain. After the session I took the opportunity to discuss the roles of registries with Mario Pena of Safe Creative and Martin Springer of osAlliance and Registered Commons. Now we are catching up with the developments that happened in the meantime.

Upcoming Podcast, scheduled for 2010