Peters – Piracy of IP

“Piracy of Intellectual Property.”Statement of Marybeth Peters.The Register of Copyrights before the Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Committee on the Judiciary.  25 May 2005.  U.S. Senate, 109th Congress, 1st Sess. 13 July 2009.   <http://www.copyright.gov/docs/regstat052505.html>. Peters recognizes that it is not realistic to end piracy globally or in the U.S. Two elements in the protection of copyright: a) legal framework that creates basic rights for copyright... Read More

Cohen – Copyright, Commodification, and Culture: Locating the Public Domain

Cohen, Julie.  “Copyright, Commodification, and Culture:  Locating the Public Domain.”  The Future of the Public Domain : Identifying the Commons in Information Law. Eds. Lucie M Guibault and C. R. Hugenholtz.  Information Law Series. Alphen aan den Rijn : Kluwer Law International: Frederick, Md., 2006. Print. This article understands that there are two sides to the copyright argument: copyleftists say that copyright threatens the public domain; copyrightists claim that... Read More

CCR760 – Sharing is Social, Meaning is Automatic: Web 2.0/3.0 – Social Media Readings

I thought the readings for the week were really interesting, if a little celebratory. . . and why shouldn’t they be?  At its core, it would appear that Web 2.0 is really about extending the realm of sociality from the meat world into digital spaces.  Collaborative web tools like RSS, Delicious, etc., herald a fundamentally different web that embraces constellations of networked social connections and allows for a decentralization (democratization?) of control from monolithic... Read More

CCR711 – Pagano & Rossi – The Crash of the Knowledge Economy

Pagano, Ugo, and Maria Alessandra Rossi. “The Crash of the Knowledge Economy.” Camb. J. Econ. 33 4 (2009): 665-83. Print. Pagano and Rossi argue in this paper that intellectual property rights (IPRs) have long acted as “super-tariffs” in global trade relations; additionally, the authors posit that the current global financial slowdown is the result of “intellectual monopolization” by IPR regimes in the United States.  To prove this point, the authors argue... Read More

Ripeanu et. al. – “Gifting Technologies: A Bittorrent Case Study”

Ripeanu, Matei et. al. “Gifting Technologies:  A Bittorrent Case Study.” First Monday 11.11 (2006). 2/15/2010. Ripeanu et.al. set out to discuss how gifting economies work in sharing communities operating bittorrent as their distribution platform.  To address the problem of freeriding in these bittorrent communities, the authors provide two options: 1) provide incentives as direct rewards to members for sharing resources or; 2) consider the motivations of members... Read More