David Parry (ed.): Ubiquitous Surveillance (2011-)

“In 1996 when John Perry Barlow wrote A Cyberspace Independence Declaration, internet pioneers hoped that the online world Bartlow was describing would come to pass. While Barlow’s rhetoric was admittedly ‘grandiose,’ his central claim, that the internet was a place of freedom separate from the limits of the physical world, reflected the utopic atmosphere of the time. The technological revolution, in particular the rise of the digital network, seemed to point to a future ‘where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity’ (Barlow, 1996). While not everyone in the late 90s could be characterized as a cyberutopian, the dominant mood harbored a sense that the digital network would bring with it newfound, unregulatable freedoms.” (from Introduction)

Publisher Open Humanities Press
Living Books About Life series

View online (wiki/PDF/HTML articles)
View online (map interface to the articles)
PDF (PDF’d Introduction with hyperlinked articles)

Jason Mazzone: Copyfraud and Other Abuses of Intellectual Property Law (2011)

Intellectual property law in the United States does not work well and it needs to be reformed—but not for the reasons given by most critics. The issue is not that intellectual property rights are too easily obtained, too broad in scope, and too long in duration. Rather, the primary problem is overreaching by publishers, producers, artists, and others who abuse intellectual property law by claiming stronger rights than the law actually gives them. From copyfraud—like phony copyright notices attached to the U.S. Constitution—to lawsuits designed to prevent people from poking fun at Barbie, from controversies over digital sampling in hip-hop to Major League Baseball’s ubiquitous restriction on sharing any “accounts and descriptions of this game,” overreaching claims of intellectual property rights are everywhere.

Overreaching interferes with legitimate uses and reproduction of a wide variety of works, imposes enormous social and economic costs, and ultimately undermines creative endeavors. As this book reveals, the solution is not to change the scope or content of intellectual property rights, but to create mechanisms to prevent people asserting rights beyond those they legitimately possess.

While there are many other books on intellectual property, this is the first to examine overreaching as a distinct problem and to show how to solve it. Jason Mazzone makes a series of timely proposals by which government, organizations, and ordinary people can stand up to creators and content providers when they seek to grab more than the law gives them.

Publisher Stanford University Press, 2011
ISBN 0804760063, 9780804760065
304 pages

Publisher
Google books

EPUB (updated on 2014-9-14)

The News Media & The Law, No 35:3: Journalists, Whistleblowers and National Security (2011)

Despite a major victory for source protection, recent prosecutions indicate a government clampdown on whistleblowers.

Publisher Lucy A. Dalglish, The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Summer 2011
Editor Gregg P. Leslie
Managing Editor Peter Haldis
Contributing Editor Mark Caramanica
Contributors Christine Beckett, Derek D. Green, Clara Hogan, Aaron Mackey, Emily Peterson, Kristen Rasmussen
ISSN: 0149-0737

View online (HTML articles)