free culture

In the first post, I talked about how factual data aren't creative works, and how compiling them into collections doesn't make them creative - at least in the US. This aspect of data rips away the core "incentive" provided by copyright law to creators: the right to sue people who make copies. It also has a second aspect, which is that the international treaties that govern copyright don't apply. Whatever one may think of those treaties, they do a fair amount to normalize the laws worldwide - a copyright on a Britney Spears tune applies in much the same way in wildly different countries. For…

I got drawn into a debate about copyrights and factual data this week that felt like it merited its own blog post. It was kind of surreal new media debating - I was going back and forth with a smart guy from the UC Berkeley school of information on a friend's Facebook wall for most of a day on the topic. It was definitely a change from the typical FB chatter and in some ways the character count constraints of a wall post were formative to the debate. But some of the questions raised deserved long answers, and the issues involved are complicated and subtle and non-obvious. Hopefully moving the…