Am I reading this right? If the owner of a "copyrighted work" cannot be located by way of any "reasonably diligent search", anyone can then use their work in anyway they choose, under the proposed "Orphan Work Act" currently being considered in the US. The Orphan Works Act defines an "orphan work" as any copyrighted work whose author any infringer says he is unable to locate with what the infringer ... Read full entry

Chances are you may never want to post any more of your photographs to photo sharing websites after reading this story. A man goes to an REM concert. The conditions on the ticket banned taking photographs, but Steve Miller and his wife, who were conveniently seated in the middle of the front row in the Royal Albert Hall in March, noticed that everyone around them was taking photographs and ... Read full entry

Graeme Philipson discusses the surreptitiously conceived Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which aims to strengthen digital copyright protection. In effect the new regulations mean border and immigration officers in treaty countries will become "copyright police", empowered to search, confiscate, or destroy, virtually at their sole discretion, any electronic device that may, or may not, hold content that contravenes copyright laws. The ACTA draft is a scary document. If a treaty based on ... Read full entry

The world's 50 most powerful blogs Maybe if had been the 100 most powerful blogs disassociated would have made the cut ;) From Prince Harry in Afghanistan to Tom Cruise ranting about Scientology and footage from the Burmese uprising, blogging has never been bigger. It can help elect presidents and take down attorney generals while simultaneously celebrating the minutiae of our everyday obsessions. Boing Boing features at number two on the ... Read full entry

"Intellectual property" is a silly euphemism Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow argues that ideas, knowledge, and information, should not be referred to as "property", as they are intangible and cannot effectively be owned by anyone once they have been shared with someone else. If you trespass on my flat, I can throw you out (exclude you from my home). If you steal my car, I can take it back (exclude ... Read full entry

A Designer's Guide to Surviving Design Competitions Carl Alviani: "If contests are so bad for the profession, why do we keep entering them?" They require enormous effort, the chances of winning are slight, and even the grand prize doesn't usually compensate for the time invested. Worse than all of this, participants stand to lose rights to their own work... Australian INfront forum members have also been discussing design competitions recently, as ... Read full entry

Don't forget to update your copyright notices (if you use them) to include 2008. Most people carry them in the footers or sidebars of their websites, so changing them globally (across the whole site) shouldn't be too difficult. In the "old days", like a year ago, before I was using a CMS, and template based web publishing, I used to have to trawl through pages and pages of ... Read full entry

Warhol is turning in his grave. The Pop Art Portraits exhibition on at London's National Portrait Gallery, which features the work of influential Pop artists such as Larry Poons, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, says a lot about the contemporary fixation with copyright. Apparently they cut up magazines, copied comic books, drew trademarked cartoon characters like Minnie Mouse, reproduced covers from Time ... Read full entry

Jerk Free Jobs: Asher Adelman who gave us eBossWatch (which I recently reviewed) has launched a job listings website that only accepts ads from employers who have received workplace awards, or been verified as a "great workplace" by an external consultant. This is an idea that is waiting to take off on a global scale! CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing from A List Apart. ... Read full entry