“Interviewing Cory Doctorow is easy. You just flip the on switch by asking the first question, and he emits a constant stream of brilliant, insightful stuff.”
- R.U. Sirius

America became an industrial power by being a pirate nation. After the American revolution, America didn’t honor the copyrights or patents of anyone except Americans. If you were a European or British inventor, your stuff could be widely pirated in America. That’s how they got rich. Only after America became a net exporter of copyrighted goods did it start to enter into treaties with other countries whereby American inventors and authors would be protected abroad in exchange for those foreign authors being protected in America.

- Cory Doctorow (interviewed by R.U. Sirius) @ 10 Zen Monkeys: link.

Over at Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow observes how ICANN policy initiatives would require “… that some perfectly infallible institution be set up to rake in gigantic profits from the sex industry while accurately dividing all material on the web into ‘porn’ and ‘not-porn.’ “

Wendy Seltzer has a great essay up today about the process by which ICANN is allocating new top-level domains (TLDs, like .com, .net, .org, and so forth). Wendy is the copyfighting civil liberties cyberlawyer who founded Chilling Effects and previously worked with me at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She’s served on the ICANN board for years — this is the US-chartered corporation that oversees the domain name system, the only really centrally governed piece of the entire Internet.

ICANN has been thrashing for years over the creation of more TLDs, like “.sex” — the idea is to recapture the edenic glory days when all .COMs were companies, all .ORGs were educational institutions and all .WS sites were in Western Samoa. A .sex TLD would be overseen so that only porn sites got .sex domains, and so that porn sites would be forced out of the .com/net/org spaces. This merely requires that some perfectly infallible institution be set up to rake in gigantic profits from the sex industry while accurately dividing all material on the web into “porn” and “not-porn.” Simple.

[Boing Boing]

One more time, with feeling:

This merely requires that some perfectly infallible institution be set up to rake in gigantic profits from the sex industry while accurately dividing all material on the web into “porn” and “not-porn.” Simple.

The good news: “Another faction has bigger ideas: they want to blow the lid off of DNS, to allow for the creation of an infinite number of TLDs. Wendy is in this faction and in “Aging the Internet Prematurely,” she sets out a stirring call-to-arms for the TLD multiverse.”

See Aging the Internet Prematurely, One PDP at a Time by Wendy Seltzer

Mark Hurst reports on morgueFile: public image reference archive

… If you aren’t the copyright holder of a particular image you want to use in you blog, you need to get permission from the copyright holder first.

However, you are free to download and use photos from Morguefile.com, a large searchable archive of beautiful, high-resolution photos (like the one shown here). You can even use them for commercial purposes.

[Mark Hurst: Rule the Web]

See Also:

How To Find Great Free Photos for Your Blog by Andrew Ferguson