Techdirt has a write-up on something I had never heard of--a special copyright introduced in 1996 which protects the contents of databases, even if all the works they list are public domain. The case Techdirt profiles involves a company which wanted to obtain some government records from the 1700s and 1800s and were told they could not: "In order to justify an exclusive right to its database, the department of Vienne told the court it had "committed more than €230,000 [about $300,000] to this project and that the digitization of documents archive had taken eight years." This is a scary story for...

Given the state of Republican rhetoric in recent years, I was very surprised to find them endorsing a cause I can actually wholeheartedly support—but they did so this past weekend, for less than 24 hours before they hastily retracted it. I refer to a paper issued by the Republican Study Committee, the caucus for House Republicans, stating that current US copyright law is stifling creativity instead of encouraging it, and is in dire need of drastic reforms. (The paper is embedded below this article.) The paper pointed out that copyright is all about encouraging the progress of the useful...

Back in September, I mentioned FutureBook’s Nick Harkaway’s interview with a former official of the UK branch of the Pirate Party. Despite the name, the Pirate Party is not a bunch of wild-eyed file-sharing anarchists who think that information ought to be free because it “wants to be”. Rather, it is an organized political party whose platform is based on the idea that copyright has become excessive and needs to be brought back toward a fairer balance. Now Harkaway has held another brief e-mail interview with the current leader of the Pirate Party, Loz Kaye. This interview focuses on...

My father is fond of telling me a parable about the roads here in Missouri. I have no way of knowing if the story is true, but it seems reasonable. Once upon a time, he tells me, there were a lot of passing zones on the highways—the broken stripes on one or both sides of the road that signify there is enough visibility that one car may dare to pass another on that stretch of road. And life was good. But subsequently, due to a new restriction in visibility requirements or for some other unknown reason, many...