"Are we the owners of our own work?"

04-17-2008 | 08:11 PM EST | 0 Comments

"Are we the owners of our own work?" a distraught J.K. Rowling rhetorically asked the court during day three of a trial at a Manhattan federal court to block publication of Steven Vander Ark's "The Harry Potter Lexicon" according to an Associate Press article out today. For those of you who haven't been following this case, Rowling, author of the Harry Potter book series, claims that the unauthorized Lexicon, published by RDR Books, is in violation of her copyrights and must not be published. According to Vander Ark, the Lexicon simply provides a guide to the characters, places and spells in Rowling's works, but Rowling maintains that Vander Ark has simply stolen her words. U.S. copyright law allows academics, critics, journalists, and teachers to use excerpts of an author's work on a limited basis. It remains to be seen whether this will protect Vander Ark or not. The trial is expected to be lengthy, and highly-esteemed legal minds are already weighing in on both sides of the argument. What I personally find particularly interesting about today's news, though, is that quote from Rowling. To me, it seems like this is a pretty good example of the way in which "ownership" and "usage" issues are getting more and more muddied these days. It also seems to me that the heart of the case is not really about whether Rowling owns her work but what right that ownership gives her to control how the public at large-uses and relates to it. This should be a particularly interesting story to follow with a cascading fallout for years to come no matter what the final decision is. To find out more, read the complete AP story.

Free to Begin

04-15-2008 | 05:15 PM EST | 0 Comments

The first post on a brand new blog is a weird thing. On the one hand, you feel all kinds of pressure to set the right tone from the start. You have a lot of expectations about the future of the blog, what'll be covered, and what the response will be. On the other hand, unless you're already famous for something, you've got to realize that probably nobody beyond a handful of your friends and family will ever read that first post . . . or maybe the first five posts . . . or first hundred posts . . . Still, there's a lot of pressure to get it right.

Well, in this first post of my new blog, I've decided to take the somewhat cliche advice of so many other authors (blog and otherwise) and start with what I know. Actually, I'm going to start this blog exactly where I started thinking about this whole topic years ago — software freedom.

I've been a user and creator of free software for many years now, and I've spoken about the ideologies behind free/open source software to countless people. Honestly, I can't remember anymore exactly when I first heard about the idea or even if I was already unknowingly using free software before I knew what it really meant, but I do know that the first time it all really sunk in was when I learned about the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or GPL for short).

As far as I'm concerned, you can't write about the current generalized battles over culture and content without pausing to acknowledge the GPL, the Free Software Foundation, and the work of Richard M. Stallman. And, while I'm not going to try to give a full account of all three of these in a single blog post (there's no way I could do even one justice), I do feel like acknowledging them at the beginning of this project is very fitting. I'm also assuming that the vast majority of people who'll have any interest in what I have to say here will already be very familiar with this particular history, but for those of you who aren't, I'd definitely encourage you to spend some time checking out these things:

1. The Free Software Foundation (www.fsf.org): To truly grasp what's going on these days in the fight between producers and consumers, you need to understand that the word "free" in the historical sense of free software refers to freedom not price.
2. The GNU GPL (www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html): This is the legal groundwork that the entire modern notion of "free to create" is based on.
3. Richard M. Stallman (www.stallman.org): This is the often controversial figure who was a pioneer of the free software movement. His thoughts on freedom and copyrights have greatly influenced both sides of the greater cultural debate being focused on here.

Well, that's it. More an introduction and acknowledgment than news or philosophical tangent, but a beginning anyway — and that had to happen one way or another.

Skip To Archive Page: 12345