On Friday, Aaron Swartz was found dead in his apartment; he’d apparently hanged himself. Swartz was only 26, a brilliant and troubled young man who suffered from clinical depression, and also an Internet activist who spoke out and acted out in favor of making access to public information more free to everyone. He was a friend of both Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow. Swartz’s other accomplishments include RECAP, a tool that uploaded public-domain legal documents retrieved from the subscription-based PACER document record system into a duplicate free-access database. He was also reportedly involved in the early stages of...

Recent days have brought both bad news and good news out of Capitol Hill on the intellectual property front. In the bad news, Representative Rick Boucher (D-VA), chair of the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, whom we’ve mentioned many times here on TeleRead for his enlightened stance on consumers’ digital rights, lost his bid for re-election. Hopefully there will be other congressmen who share Boucher’s points of view. But there is also some unexpectedly good news. The FTC has appointed its first ever Chief Technologist, and they could not possibly have chosen a better man...

Lawrence Lessig has a piece in the Huffington Post stemming from a presentation he gave last week at an award ceremony. Lessig was a judge for a video remix contest put on by web video host Vimeo, and as part of his participation on a panel he gave a speech relating to the importance of remixes, and how they relate to copyright and fair use. (Lessig is known for his expertise in this field, given that he has written entire books about remix culture and related matters.) I bring this up not to touch upon Lessig’s statements about...

A couple weeks ago, I posted about reviews of Nick Bilton’s new book, I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works. After reading the sample chapters, I was intrigued, but I don’t have the money right now to go around buying books just because I want to read them. So I hopped on the web, and a short time later I was reading the book for free. (That is to say, I placed a hold request at my public library’s website, and a few days later picked up the hardcover. Why, what did you think I...

The Creative Commons licensing system has gone hand in hand with a lot of e-book-and e-writing-related news. For example, Cory Doctorow and others use it to give their e-books away for people to read for free while retaining rights to other uses, and Ficly (and its predecessor Ficlets) uses it to permit selected uses of reader-submitted content. (In fact, it is because Ficlets used that license that Ficly was able to rescue its predecessor’s archives.) Lately, ASCAP has launched a fundraising campaign painting Creative Commons (as well as Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation) as a threat...

Chris Good has an interesting piece in the Atlantic (found via Slashdot) pointing out one of the unforeseen consequences of the digital age on the nominations of judicial appointees such as Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. Nominees to the Supreme Court and other high-profile judicial positions must provide the Senate Judiciary Committee with a copy of everything they’ve ever written or said publicly. It used to be that this was a relatively simple and straightforward thing—but thanks to Lexis-Nexis and the Internet, not only is it possible to find a lot more pre-existing media, but there are also...