There’s been a lot talked about copyright recently what it is, what it isn’t, and I want to use this post to examine what I think it is.

A little potted history first. The idea of copyright arose initially in the 16th century with the advent of a new technology: the printing press. This was a revolutionary period in terms of content creation. What had previously been the province of the individual scholar hand-copying documents suddenly became a lot easier to do and a lot quicker. This is the essential difference that the printing press made. And, in England, the right to print these was governed by the Crown, and this was used to censor and suppress material that the Crown felt did not benefit it. (more…)

I blame two brown people for this blog: Mike Brown of Webstock, and Russell Brown of Public Address. Mike and I were talking in Sydney, back in 2005 after the Web Essentials 05 conference, and one of our takeaways was that all god’s chillun got a blog. And a Flickr account. Mike went on to start Webstock, which I call the hard way to getting a blog, and we both got on Flickr, but I was unconvinced about this whole blogging thing. In one sense, it’s what we were doing back in the 90’s with personal homepages. But, I thought, most of them were lame and many of the blogs I’ve encountered are the same, filling your screen with the minutiae of the owner’s daily life. Did the world really need yet another technologist imparting the ultimate truth to an audience that consists of his mother and siblings? No, I thought, stay in the comments section and participate from there. But a seed was planted. (more…)