derivative work

Our cyberpunk future approaches: monkeys with brain implants can control robotic devices.

I was checking out Tor’s new wallpapers and thinking about the uses of provenance in the art world. Tor is a science fiction publisher, and they’ve been doing one of those Publisher Experiments with the new digital world. (In fact, Tor released this week Farthing by Jo Walton for free — this was an amazing [...]

A few days ago, the Village Voice wrote an article about a series of World of Warcraft-inspired porn; their article was duly picked up by BoingBoing. Strangely, BoingBoing missed the IP angle — that “Whorelore”‘s original name was “Whorecraft” but they ran into an “IP” issue, presumably trademark. You can still see “Whorecraft” on some [...]

A friend just sent me a link to this fan video about the TV series “Supernatural”. What an awesome demonstration of the power of technology to enable media criticism. A thousand feminists could comment about exploitative or graphic visual depictions of violence against women in a series or on TV generally, and it would never [...]

Regal Entertainment Group has designed a little device so movie-goers can wirelessly complain about things that are affecting their experience, plus, of course, PIRACY! New York Magazine had a great idea about what to do with the device at Pirates of the Caribbean 3: First of all, we’re amused by the button marked PIRACY. We [...]

(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, [...]

Today, on our way to the Fung Wah bus (we never got there, but that’s another story), my partner & I happened to stop in at a bookstore/teahouse for brunch. Then we realized that they were actually having a booksigning by Margaret Atwood. I’m in the middle of a huge deadline, and have just started [...]

I was deeply saddened early this week to learn that Octavia Butler had died. She exemplified the spirit of inquiry that makes science fiction truly the literature of ideas. Below I collect a number of resources about Octavia Butler. Action Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund Obituaries and Remembrances SFWA Remembrances Memories in the comments [...]

Today is a beautifully misty day, perfect for leisurely procrastination from holiday tasks like installing back-up hard drives for the mom-in-law. (Well, “in-law” if we were in Mass.; everywhere else in the US, “mom-in-out-law”.) So naturally I found myself doing a little backlog reading of blogs that I don’t read every day, and was fortunate [...]

San Francisco’s counterPULSE Theater got a cease-and-desist from Fox TV demanding they cancel their sold-out live action performance of “Once More, With Feeling” (the Buffy musical). According to SFist, Buffy creator Joss Whedon said he had no objection to the staging of the show. [link from whedonesque]

South African inventor Sonette Ehlers has developed the “rapex”, a barbed female condom aimed at discouraging rapists. A coordinator for Rape Crisis cautions that the device could backfire, and rapists in penile pain might respond with increased violence. Of course, Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash (1992) was all over this idea: his teenage protagonist wore [...]

hollywood.com 9/12 HOLLYWOOD, September 12, 2005 Wood Stunned by Gay Photo ‘Revelations’ By WENN …………………………………….. Elijah Wood is continually stunned by clever cyber pranksters who try to prove he is gay. The Lord of the Rings star is often caught out by Web sites with far from subtle names, like www.veryverygay.com, when he’s surfing the [...]

The copyright notice in Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography (2002): No part of this book may be used, reproduced, destroyed, tampered with, or eaten without written permission except in the case of brief, possibly coded quotations embodied in critical articles, reviews, and subpoenas. Allegedly printed in the United States of America. For information address HarperCollins [...]

ordinarily i’m interested in quotes from artists & creators that evidence awareness of or interest in non-copyright maximalism. but in today’s NYT article (“King Kong vs. Pirates of the Multiplex”) there was a quote from Peter Jackson: “Piracy has the very real potential of tipping movies into becoming an unprofitable industry, especially big-event films. If [...]

The widely quoted, hilarious response by Terry Pratchett to the Canadian court order [more from Michael Geist] applied to early purchasers of Harry Potter 6: Terry Pratchett, by a strange coincidence, chose the H*rry P*tter launch day to issue a stern warning about his next Discworld novel: ‘Now that the bound proof copies of _Thud!_ [...]

Okay, I’m on some kind of a roll with fictional discussions of IP etc. Here’s another: Lois McMaster Bujold, in Barrayar, chronicled a cross-cultural exchange about the value of information access. Cordelia, from the planet Beta, is shocked that poor people don’t have access to information; Vorkosigan, from the planet Barrayar, is shocked at her [...]

John Varley has made more than a few comments about IP and information politics in his various stories. The Golden Globe (recommended) was centrally concerned with an actor named Sparky Valentine, and Sparky had a few observations about IP: In the early days, when they were considering various ideas for a corporate logo, Valentine had [...]

Well, in the Barrayaran universe, anyway. Lois McMaster Bujold, in Memory, mentions patent labeling techniques during a briefing on a “bioengineered apoptotic prokaryote”: “I could read much of its product history off its molecular structure. First of all, whoever made this did not begin from scratch. This is a modification of an existing, patented apoptotic [...]

and now the International Trailer for “Serenity” related posts: yippee yippee