Guardian columnist Victor Keegan recently joined a growing chorus of forward-thinking people in calling for lawmakers to roll-back or at least counter-balance the ever-tightening regime of copyright law. Keegan laments the efforts of entrenched Hollywood interests to further extend the lifespan of copyright protection and calls for lawmakers to tip the balance of copyright law in favour of users and amateur creators. Here’s an excerpt from what Keegan had to say in the Guardian: We [...]

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Sun Microsystems announced today that the its opening up the source code for its popular Java software platform. With Java powering some 3.8 billion cell phones, supercomputers, medical devices, and other gadgets, the announcement represents one of the largest additions of computer code to the open-source community and marks a significant shift for a company that had once fiercely protected its source code. Like an increasing number of large software vendors, Sun recognizes that openning [...]

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To say that all books will soon be wiki-style books is no doubt an exaggeration, but the day is surely coming when a significant proportion of books will have some wiki-component. A number of books are already being made available for wiki-style editing and elaboration after the “first edition” is published and we are now seeing the first generation of books that are the product of large-scale wiki-style collaborations. Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales, for example, [...]

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