Mike Masnick at Techdirt has put together a nice reading list on "intellectual property. link here. For those of us who were brought up brain washed on the constitutional sanctity of patents and copyrights, and have since learned better, it is cheering to know that there is this much available in print.
His site also has a nice quote from one of the great critics and professors of English literature. In a word, memorable:
During the course of this long volume I have undoubtedly plagiarized from many sources--to use the ugly term that did not bother Shakespeare's age. I doubt whether any criticism or cultural history has ever been written without such plagiary, which inevitably results from assimilating the contributions of your countless fellow-workers, past and present. The true function of scholarship as a society is not to stake out claims on which others must not trespass, but to provide a community of knowledge in which others may share."
-F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance 1941 link here
You might be interested in my work against gene patents, and the ire it has raised among the patent bar:
Who Owns You? The Corporate Gold Rush to Patent Your Genes the book can be found
Amazon link, and there's even a torrent of it floating around out there. The corporate bigwigs are panicking and resorting to attacking me personally, even while ignoring my central arguments about the nature of a "commons by necessity" and it encompassing the human genome (and other natural genomes).
The provided link was "broken". I hope that one below works.
Techdirt Book Reading List 2009
I just emailed Bill Patry congratulating him on restarting his blog and mentioning my plan to liberate a copy of his new book. He mentioned that the first printing had a number of typos, which will be corrected in the second print run, expected in mid-September.
Btw, the Aug. 22 issue of The Economist (out today) has an interesting article on copyright in Australia, "Copyrights and Wrongs," p. 57. It might take a well deserved hit. The "Coalition for Cheaper Books" is booming "wider reading through cheaper books." Shades of the 19th century spread of literacy in the U.S. thanks to the cheaper books made possible by the lack of copyright protection for foreign authors.
