you might have heard that the Wikimedia Foundation and the National Portrait Gallery are having a bit of a row these days. At the core of the dispute lies the fact that in march an English wikipedia administrator by the name of Derrick Coetzee uploaded more than 3000 high resolution images of paintings held by […]

Last Wednesday I attended the launch of ‘Adieu auteursrecht, vaarwel culturele conglomeraten‘ the new book by Joost Smiers. In this book he argues that (a) copyright is harmful, because it has led to large conglomerates dominating the production of culture and that (b) the world would be better off without copyright because it would be […]

Early last year the Dutch government (the ministry for Economic Affairs, the Justice Department and the ministry for Education Culture and Science to be precise) commissioned a research report on the socio economical aspects of (peer 2 peer) file sharing. Last week the research consortium formed by TNO, SEO & IvIR published the final version […]

In July 2008 the European Commission published a Green Paper on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy. According to the Commission,
The purpose of the Green Paper is to foster a debate on how knowledge for research, science and education can best be disseminated in the online environment. The Green Paper aims to set out a number […]

Professor Bernt Hugenholtz the director of the Institute for Information Law (IVIR) at the University in Amsterdam (and Legal project Lead for Creative Commons Netherlands) has written an open letter to the president of the European Commission, Manuel Barroso in which he is expressing his irritation with the European Commissions policy making process in […]

Felix Stalder has posted an interesting review of the recent Economies of the Commons Conference (organized by Knowledgeland in collaboration with the Balie, Images for the Future, p2p fusion and Creative Commons Netherlands) to the nettime mailing list.
His review highlights the increasingly difficult position that large archive projects (like Images for the Future) find […]

over the weekend the american industrial rock band band Nine Inch Nails released their new album titled ‘Ghosts I-IV‘ via their own website. With this release the Nine Inch Nails - lead by their outspoken frontman Trent Reznor - join a number of artists (Radiohead, Madonna, …) who, after being freed from long running contracts […]

over the past two days i have been attending an workshop on the ‘The Socio-Economic Impact of Social Computing: validation and policy options’ organized by the Institute for Prospective Technology Studies (IPTS) in Sevilla, Spain. The IPTS is one of the 7 research institutes of the Joint research directorate of the European Commission and researches […]