Back in October, you may recall that software company Astrolabe claimed copyright over the time zone database and sued the volunteer maintainers of the public time zone database that is used by basically everyone to properly set the time. ICANN took o… Continue reading →

The days of barbers applying leeches as a healthy regime for bloodletting is long gone (thankfully). But there are still a lot of medical practices that haven’t changed that much over time. The history of bandages stretches back thousands of years, so … Continue reading →

I’ve been debating whether or not it’s worth doing this post for a few weeks now, but with so much sudden interest in Pinterest and how it fits in the copyright scheme of things, people keep asking “when,” not “if,” we were going to write about it, so … Continue reading →

I’ve been debating whether or not it’s worth doing this post for a few weeks now, but with so much sudden interest in Pinterest and how it fits in the copyright scheme of things, people keep asking “when,” not “if,” we were going to write about it, so … Continue reading →

A few weeks ago, we noted that Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk had agreed to suspend attempts to ratify ACTA while he explored the details — completely flip-flopping on his earlier adamant support for the agreement. However, late last week he wen… Continue reading →

One of the things I’ve never liked about copyright is its potential to be the functional equivalent of censorship. Sometimes this censorship comes about because an author didn’t get permission to create his work in the first place (see: Richard Prince,… Continue reading →

Late last week, the Washington Post reported that The Smithsonian had acquired “tapes, documentation, copyrights, and over 50,000 lines of code from V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, who both the Smithsonian and the Washington Post insisted was the “inventor of e-… Continue reading →

It appears that ACTA’s main political backers, the EU Commission, have finally realized that they were increasingly in trouble in terms of actually getting ACTA ratified. The EU’s main negotiator on ACTA, Karel De Gucht has now said that the Commissio… Continue reading →