Tomorrow, the European Parliament will vote on the issue of copyright term extension for sound recordings, known in Parliamentese as “the Crowley Report (A6-0070/2009) on the Term of protection of copyright and related rights” (Mr Brian Crowley is the rapporteur for this report and a strong supporter of the extension).
Extending term would be a [...]
On March 18th I was in Brussels to give a talk as one of two “invited experts” (the other being from the Motion Picture Association) to a session on the topic of “Copyright Enforcement” held by the Working Group on Authors’ Rights of the European Parliament’s JURI Committee. Below is the slightly tidied up text [...]
Yesterday (Monday) The Times published an open letter signed by many of the leading UK academics concerned with the issue of copyright term extension.
The letter, of which I was a signatory, is focused on the change in the UK government’s position (from one of opposition to a term extension to, it appears, one [...]
The Open Knowledge Foundation’s 2009 Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon), which I help organize, will take place next Saturday 28th March – less than a week away.
Full details including programme can be found either in this blog post or on the OKCon home page.
As usual this will be a fun and [...]
Background
I’m working on a EU funded project to look at the size and value of the Public Domain. This involves getting large datasets about cultural material and trying to answer questions like: How many of these items are in the public domain? What’s the difference in price and availability of public domain versus non [...]
Just came across an interesting working paper put out last Autumn that is relevant to the openness and innovation debate. Entitled: Of Mice and Academics: Examining the Effect of Openness on Innovation and authored by Fiona Murray, Philippe Aghion, Mathias Dewatripont, Julian Kolev and Scott Stern, it is an attempt to bring some empirical [...]
A new Dutch study on the effects of filesharing has just come out. Unfortunately it is all in dutch! However, courtesy of online translation, it appears the basic message is that filesharing has a net positive impact on welfare (though they term this the ‘economic’ impact):
File sharing has net positive economic impact
The [...]
One of the things I’ve been playing around with over the last few months is the NBER Patent dataset. This provides a listing of all US patents from 1963-1999 together with a full set of citations for patents in the period 1975-1999.
As it is an open dataset you’re able to get it [...]
Lots of people have been up in arms about a letter sent out by Ordnance Survey about the “Use of Google Maps for display and promotion purposes”. With titles like “Are the Show Us A Better Way winners safe from Ordnance Survey?” (Guardian), “Home Secretary’s crime maps not allowed say Ordnance Survey” (localgov.co.uk) [...]
It would be interesting to chart over time the progress of open-source, standards compliant, Mozilla-type web browsers (e.g. Firefox) versus Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. As is often the case in other areas, it is not easy to get good (open) data over a reasonable time period. The graph below shows browser market share as measured [...]
About
Dr. Rufus Pollock is co-Founder and Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation, a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, and an Associate of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge.
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