Digital Rights Management and the Process of Fair Use

This article examines several such proposals and finds that they are not likely to provide users with the same measure of protections for fair use of copyrighted works that exists in the offline world.

Podcasting Legal Guide: Rules for the Revolution

Podcasting Legal Guide: Rules for the Revolution -- a collaboration between Creative Commons and the Berkman Center Clinical Program in Cyberlaw reviewing copyright, trademark and other legal issues related to podcasting and providing a helpful list of resources for podcasters.

Frames from the Framers: How America's Revolutionaries Imagined Intellectual Property

The dominant metaphor in England for many years had compared creative work to the harvest of a landed estate. The estate metaphor was bounded by two others, however: commonwealth and monopoly. For some, the fruits of creativity should be “common stock,” as free and general as air or water, and therefore the estate in question should not be a private holding but more like the old agricultural commons. For others, private estates were fine, but no one should monopolize their fruits. Copyright and patent were understood to be monopolies, and unchecked monopolies were understood as social evils.

The Digital Learning Challenge: Obstacles to Educational Uses of Copyrighted Material in the Digital Age

This foundational white paper reports on a year-long study by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, examining the relationship between copyright law and education. In particular, we wanted to explore whether innovative educational uses of digital technology were hampered by the restrictions of copyright. We found that provisions of copyright law concerning the educational use of copyrighted material, as well as the business and institutional structures shaped by that law, are among the most important obstacles to realizing the potential of digital technology in education.

The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

25th Anniversary Edition

The Gift: The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World Originally published April 1983; second edition December 2007. by, Lewis Hyde

Free Culture

How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity

In his two previous books, CODE and THE FUTURE OF IDEAS, Lessig concentrated on the destruction of much of the original promise of the Internet. Now, in FREE CULTURE, he widens his focus to consider the diminishment of the larger public domain of ideas. In this powerful wake-up call he shows how short-sighted interests blind to the long-term damage they’re inflicting are poisoning the ecosystem that fosters innovation.