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10 Documentaries That Will Make You a Better Person

By Alison Nastasi on

From Food, Inc. to The Age of Stupid, we’ve rounded up 10 great documentaries that make powerful, life-changing statements about social, environmental, and economic… Read More

News

James Joyce Estate Claims Copyright Infringement on Quote “Gene”

By Marina Galperina on

Moved by James Joyce’s line from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life,” genetic scientist Craig Venter coded the quote into the DNA of a synthetic microbe he’d been working on — the first of its kind.… Read More

News

FBI Orders Wikipedia to Remove Bureau’s Official Seal

By Paul Hiebert on

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s motto is “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.” With its latest action against Wikipedia, however, it may have compromised its third virtue. In a letter sent to Wikimedia Foundation, the FBI demanded that Wikipedia remove the Bureau’s official seal from its site, which is posted under an article about the FBI. The letter stated that “The FBI has not authorized use of the FBI seal on Wikipedia” and “the inclusion of a high quality graphic of the FBI seal on Wikipedia is particularly problematic, because it facilitates both deliberate and unwitting violations of these restrictions by Wikipedia users.” If Wikipedia doesn’t comply with these requests, it may find itself in court. … Read More

Music

Why Is the RIAA Going After In Rainbows Downloaders?

By Judy Berman on

Earlier today, Boing Boing brought an interesting piece of news to our attention: The RIAA and the FBI have instructed Google “to disable blogger accounts and filter search results where Radiohead’s In Rainbows is offered for free.” Now, as you will surely recall, In Rainbows was the band’s revolutionary pay-what-you-want experiment. For a limited time, fans could download it for free if they wished. And that raises an interesting question. Boing Boing quotes Mike Masnick at TechDirt, who wonders, “TorrentFreak notes, accurately, that Radiohead did do deals with major labels for distribution of the physical album of In Rainbows, but I was pretty sure they kept the copyrights themselves. Perhaps that’s not the case?”

So, what gives? We did some research to figure out the status of Radiohead’s In Rainbows copyrights. … Read More

Film

Video of the Day: When Copyright Goes Bad

By Caroline Stanley on

Your rights as a consumer in the digital age are at serious risk because copyright rules no longer do what they are supposed to do. According to filmmakers Ben Cato Clough and Luke Upchurch, their 15-minute film When Copyright Goes Bad is “an introduction to the renegotiation of copyright and is for anyone interested in how copyright is affecting consumers.” It features some of the key voices in the debate, including Public Enemy co-founder Hank Shocklee and Fred Von Lohmann of the Electric Frontier Foundation, and explains how corporate lobbying makes everyday criminals out of all of us.

Click through to find out what the future of copyright law holds. … Read More