Julianna Yau’s blog

Today, I was also sent an invitation to the Education, Culture and the Knowledge Economy Conference hosted by The Centre for Innovation Law and Policy:

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The Centre for Innovation Law and Policy is pleased to announce that we will be hosting an Education, Culture and the Knowledge Economy Conference on Friday, June 6, 2008.

The conference will take place at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law, 78 Queen’s Park, Toronto, Ontario. Further details will be posted to our website at www.innovationlaw.org as available.

The conference is free of charge, and all are welcome. Advance registration is required; you may register by email to centre.ilp@utoronto.ca.

This event is sponsored by the CILP’s Microsoft Law and the Information Society Project.

Centre for Innovation Law & Policy
University of Toronto, Faculty of Law
78 Queen’s Park
Toronto, ON M5S 2C5
(t) 416-978-3724
(f) 416-978-2648
centre.ilp@utoronto.ca
www.innovationlaw.org

Tags: clip, conferences, culture, education

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A while ago, others wrote about the conundrum of the concept of “intellectual property” (Cory Doctorow and Mike Masnick; Russell McOrmond has also been concerned about the use of the phrase as jargon for some time). Many of the lectures presented by the Centre for Innovation Law & Policy have also touched on the link between creativity and ownership of that creativity.

I’ve been mulling over these thoughts, and am trying to make some sense of why and whether physical output is fundamentally different from intellectual output. It is difficult to penetrate this because it suffers from similar philosophical challenges as the link between the mind and body.

Issues of copyright are seeming to develop more shades of grey in the differentiation between the ownership of a thing and the copying of an idea. Copyright law generally prevents ideas from receiving protection, but whether it’s a question of basketball, wanting to be someone’s boyfriend, toilet paper or other silliness, people are pushing the limits of what can be protected by copyright and what can be owned.

The problem is perhaps how easily ideas can now be stolen from creative persons to be made into the fortunes of the business-savvy. One of the recent examples of this is OLPC’s XO laptop, which is threatening to be another Atari 400 or Commodore 64. Although it would be difficult to successfully argue that the concept of an inexpensive and small portable computing device was “stolen” or “belonged” to the pioneers at OLPC, their literal inability to deliver the XO is suspected to be a factor in the departure of some of the major minds behind the project.

Of course, an idea on its own is almost completely useless. Whether it is political, philosophical, artistic, technological, musical or otherwise, an idea which never gets past the conceptual stage is little more than exercise for your brain. But how do we find a balance between rewarding the birth of new ideas and allowing people to stand on the shoulder of giants?

Tags: clip, copyright, cory doctorow, ip, mike masnick, olpc, philosophy, russell mcormond, xo laptop

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Primary Sources on Copyright, a digital archive project for primary sources on copyright, is hosting a two-day conference on Wednesday 19th and Thursday 20th March 2008 in London, England. The keynote speakers will be Professor Mark Rose University of California Santa Barbara, Professor Laurent Pfister University of Versailles Saint-Quentin and Professor Karl Nikolaus Peifer Köln University. Professor Rose recently presented a lecture at the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy, which I covered here. The conference will end with the launch of the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property.

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The Centre for Innovation Law and Policy is already scheduling their lectures for 2008.  Here are some upcoming lectures:

• The Public Sphere and the Emergence of Copyright (Mark Rose), Tuesday, January 22, 2008, 12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
• Rethinking Copyright (Jessica Litman), Jan 29, 2008, Lecture 5:00 – 6:00 pm, Reception at 7:00 PM
• Education, Culture and the Knowledge Economy (Darin Barney), Tuesday, March 4, 2008, 12:30-2:00pm
• Innovation Law and Theory Workshop (Ann Bartow), Tuesday, March 25, 2008, 12:30-2:00pm

Tags: Canada, clip, lectures

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