The Copyright Cage
"We are in the midst of a cultural war over copyright, in which the salvos show the complete disconnect between the colliding copyright regimes of statute and practicality, law and life." This overview article surveys a wide range of issues and contains numerous examples of the misapplication of copyright law. More...

A Stroll Through Patent History
"Developing countries like India, which is scheduled to come into full compliance with an international patent treaty in 2005, may be better off without strong patent laws." Many people have been saying this for a while, but this author has come up with some proof. More...

Emaki Productions
Jeremy sent me this, found, he says, with a nice collection of other visual language references on Peter Merholz's site, a fascinating website by Neil Cohn on the subject of visual language. The idea behind this theory is that images in a sequence embody a grammar similar in form to Chomsky's syntactic structures. More...

Oregon is Still a Soft Touch for Microsoft
The interesting bit in this article isn't the description of Microsoft's tactics against Linux in schools. More...

We've Seen the Future, Indian Prez Tells Gates - And You're Not In It
The main message in this multi-threaded article is that proprietary software is "devastating" for developing economies. More...

Content Syndication: Ready for the Masses?
The best part of this artile is near the beginning where the author describes the different potential uses of content syndication in different industries, including education. Most of the article, though, is a sort of 'parallel history' of syndication, as seen from the corporate perspective. Syndication hasn't really worked in that market. More...

Dave Winer's OSCOM Keynote
Absolutely fascinating running commentary of Dave Winer's keynote address last week at the OSCOM conference. It's an IRC chat transcript, so you may have to work a bit to isolate the threads and decipher the geek shorthand. More...

The Electronic Naturalist
I will be talking in Newfoundland next week about 'learning objects in a wider context' - and this link is an example of at least a part of what I'm talking about. More...

Taking Creativity To Task
This article begins as though it is some sort of reactionary criticism to the thesis that the measure of diversity in a society is also the measure of its creativity. The objection, though, could be summed up with the observation that diversity, while a necessary condition, is not a sufficient condition. And I agree. More...

The Self-Made Lawyer
Fascinating account of the alternative to law school for those who wish to become lawyers - "reading the law" involves working alongside a practicing lawyer for a period of time while preparing for the Bar exam on one's own. More...