Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

As you’ll know from reading my blog, I am deeply concerned with the stranglehold that copyright law maintains over the free expression of ideas on the internet. As a blogger, the effects of copyright on the blogworld hits especially close to home.

The Free Culture movement presents a great opportunity to propagate a more open view of the internet than the conventional interpretation of copyright might otherwise allow. I’d like to recommend for your review the following tremendous resources which deal with copyright, fair use and promoting free expression on the web:

Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons These are the good folks who put Diebold’s 15,000 coroprate documents online in order to warn us that Diebold’s electronic voting system was shoddy and prone to security breaches. I’m pleased to say that Swarthmore’s general counsel sided with them by determining that the publication of the documents on a University server WAS covered by Fair Use. Diebold later dropped its objection to online posting.

Chilling Effects is a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, and University of Maine law school clinics.

Chilling Effects aims to help you understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws give to your online activities. We are excited about the new opportunities the Internet offers individuals to express their views, parody politicians, celebrate their favorite movie stars, or criticize businesses. But we’ve noticed that not everyone feels the same way. Anecdotal evidence suggests that individual copyright holders and corporations are using intellectual property and other laws to silence online users.

FAQs about Copyright and Fair Use is a great overview of Fair Use and the ways in which it may protect online users from the threat of copyright infringement.