derivative work

Olivia Judd’s science blog in the NYT today is about the effect of libel on science writing — very interesting.

The New York Times covers research showing that marital happiness increases when the kids leave home. Contrary to popular opinion, which has suggested that parents — particularly moms — suffer depression from “empty nest syndrome”, research published in November in Psychological Science found that “marital satisfaction actually improves” when the kids leave home. But if [...]

oh, sure, there are lots of interesting goings-on in the world of copyright / IP / info / intellectual freedom / privacy / tech law / policy / librarianship / etc. plus of course the endlessly fascinating polling data on the various elections. (i’m voting YES on questions 2 and 3 in massachusetts: ban dog [...]

Two things annoyed me in the last 24 hours. Well, two media things. First, this morning in an article about same-sex marriage in the NYT, there was utter stupid cluelessness that led me to conclude the article must have been written by a straight person. And indeed, But then I just looked at the byline [...]

Sadly, Linda Greenhouse is leaving the NYT. I hope she enjoys her retirement, and I hope the NYT manages to get another legal reporter who’s as good as Greenhouse. And, dare I say it, another high-profile woman on staff.

Hal Varian, the economist, has a nice editorial on orphan works.

After the silly editorial by Mark Helprin, who has obviously been confused by an absolutist romantic view of “property”, the NYT published 7 or 8 letters all in substantive disagreement. Now their theater section looks at another problem that copyright terms can cause: over-control of casting decisions by playwright’s heirs. Since Bernard-Marie Koltès died in [...]

Good going, NYT — on their new “http://midtermmadness.blogs.nytimes.com/”, which offers an array of commentators, professors, and pundits to comment on the 2006 elections … they’ve given us six (6) men, all apparently white, and dare I guess their class backgrounds? Way to seek a diversity of opinion.       

(1) Today’s NYT article on “tough questions” for gubernatorial candidates on abortion: all the gubernatorial candidates quoted are men. [NYT 6/5] (2) Mercury Rising discusses what happened to Wen Ho Lee after the racist government debacle a few years back. [sideshow 6/4] (3) I don’t believe I’ve plugged Ann Bartow’s “Fair Use and the Fairer [...]

Yet another instance of boys-read-boys makes the news. This time, Dave Itzkoff’s new “It’s All Geek To Me” column in the NYT. My partner thought I’d be excited — and I was — to see science fiction getting a column in the NYT. Alas, though, it’s only a boy-reads-boys column. The first column (March 5, [...]

This nyt article on teen s3xc@ms raised a lot of interesting issues, not least of which was the role of the NYT reporter(s) in developing the story. update 3pm 12/20: I see that I wasn’t alone in finding the journalist ethics issues troubling. Jack Shafer @ Slate also raised the issue, and got the reporter [...]

Yahoo!’s historically less-than-stellar track record of protecting user privacy is made much, much worse by this news: Yahoo! turned over a user’s identity information to the Chinese government, and now journalist Shi Tao has been sentenced to ten years for “e-mailing a government’s plan to restrict media coverage around the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen [...]

I never cease to be astonished by how smarmy politicans can be: today, leaders in the Smarm Community, the anti-choice people (‘pro-lifers’). The latest RU-486 story in the NYT, sensationalistically titled “2 More Women Die After Abortion Pills”, covers two recent RU-486 deaths (two, for a total of five; four of which were probably infection-related). [...]

The NYT ran two articles today on copies of art, both listed on the front page in the respective sections: One listed in the “arts” section and titled “Imitations That Transcend Flattery” by Roberta Smith, and the other breathlessly titled Own Original Chinese Copies of Real Western Art! by Keith Bradsher, and listed in the [...]

The NYT profiled a new study that claims that bi-identified men really are either attracted exclusively either to men or women. And another new study is reported in The Scotsman about sex differences in the experience of and tolerance for pain. As a rule I don’t think very highly of research on sex differences; research [...]

The NYT ran an article today (5/26) about rap/hiphop music in Bolivia. Young artists are using hiphop & rap to get their message of social justice, democracy, and peace. One young artist talks about copyright infringement: The one CD the rappers recorded, called “Wayna Rap,” sells robustly on the streets of El Alto, pirated by [...]