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 […]

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 […]

Knowledgeland, Sound & Vision, The Balie and other organizations host the conference ‘Economies of the Commons’ at debate-center The Balie in Amsterdam on Friday 11th and Saturday 12th of April . Leading experts and specialists from audiovisual archives (BBC, INA), libraries, frontrunners in open access and the music industry (Last.fm and Fabchannel), cultural producers, p2p- […]

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 […]

PICNIC ‘07 has started! Knowledgeland hosts several events and has sent scouts to others. Keep this blog open for the latest updates! 

Creativecommons.org has been thoroughly restyled. A fresh face has been applied to the website. I think the new design of the Commons Deeds (the texts that tell you the main content of the license) looks really fresh. Also some of the symbols used to clarify the licenses have been altered. A notable change is the […]

Australia has reviewed its copyright law and will allow Australians to make private copies of copyrighted work. This means that people who copy cd’s to their iPod are no longer breaking the law. With any luck the new law will come into effect before Christmas.
Meanwhile, in the UK Andrew Gowers published the Gowers Review of […]

It’s been some weeks now since Copybot invoked Second Life citizens to revolt. And days have passed since the British government did decide not to extend the duration of copyright protection. We have also become aware of it that Microsoft’s Zune does not go well together with Creative Commons. While this weblog was down the […]

Let’s start licensing architecture under Creative Commons licenses so that architects like these Chinese designers can copy buildings as much as they like.