Stanford Center for Internet and Society

P.B. Hugenholtz, M.M.M. van Eechoud, S.J. van Gompel et al., from U. of Amsterdam, Institute of Information Law have published their report to the European Commission on The Recasting of Copyright & Related Rights for the Knowledge Economy.

Here are some of the April Fool's news from the file-sharing universe. The scary thing is, that they are (or should be) all real alternatives, and each and every prank shows a solution to the current problems.

Lawrence Lessig joins RIAA board of directors

I am researching for my talk to be delivered to the International Intellectual Property Program at Chicago-Kent Law School.

I had an AHAAA moment last night reading Martha Woodmansee’s „ The Author, Art, and the Market”. She writes „As my sketch of writers’ struggles suggests, eighteenth-century Germany found itself in a transitional phase between the limited patronage of an aristocratic age and the democratic patronage of the marketplace.

In the last few weeks I bumped into several articles addressing the question why people feel OK to up- and download mp3s despite all the laws and legal threats, and how to close the gap between existing copyright legislation and social norms, norms that seem to have a much greater effect on how people behave than laws.

This is the most important thing that has happened on the intellectual property front lately. Former Soviet president Gorbachev asks Microsoft's Bill Gates not to pursue IP litigation against a high school teacher in Perm who used pirated software in classroom because:

- he is poor
- he has dedicated his life to teaching

First it was "Rip! Mix! and Burn!" Now it is simply just "Burn!"

Please see my research blog at www.warsystems.hu, where i post news clipping from the world of intellectual property and file-sharing daily.