Monthly Archives: October 2010

At the end of this month, the last patent issued by the GDR government will be expiring, the twenty year term  having passed since reunification in October 1990. Patent terms are somewhat human, at 20 years—things invented and patented in my lifetime have now fallen into the public domain. Copyright is so much longer (generally, [...]

The Free Culture Research Conference is happening right now at the Freie Universität in Berlin. I’m here and live-blogging it right today and tomorrow, and posting tweets and dents tagged #fcrc, and I’ll probably post some kind of wrap-up later. UPDATE: Whew, it’s over. I posted wrap-ups of Geert Lovink’s keynote, a panel on Wikimedia, [...]

Marc Hedlund, one of the founders of the personal finance tracking website Wesabe, has put up an excellent blog post about why his company lost to the more popular Mint service, in spite of being the first mover and having other important advantages. It’s not dispassionate, but it’s engaging and a fair analysis. Most interesting [...]

Nice catch by the NYTPicker, a blog devoted to “the goings-on inside the New York Times.” Professor Robert Thompson of Syracuse University has been quoted over 150 times in the paper by 78 different reporters, on about as many different topics. To these 78 NYT reporters, Thompson has offered a convenient shortcut past that necessary [...]