Creative Models & Community Constraints

Legal Contradictions Manifest in Video Game Worlds: Copyright through the Post-Structuralist Looking Glass

In the spring I was invited by my colleague Gaetano Dimita (http://www.law.qmul.ac.uk/staff/dimita.html) of The School of Law, Queen Mary University of London to participate in the second edition of an academic conference he organizes called “More Than Just A Game: Interactive Entertainment & Intellectual Property Law”. The conference, which took place on April 8, 2016 […]

Conference version of “Relating Memes of Justice & Technology”

Conference version of “Relating Memes of Justice & Technology”

Though most but far from all of the slides in this presentation to the 2015 SLS Conference at TRU Law on February 5, 2015 have made it into some the decks in this course, thought it might be slightly helpful to anyone really interested in the ideas if the latest full presentation appeared all in […]

Utilitarian Justifications at the Grammys

Utilitarian Justifications at the Grammys

Recording Academy president Neil Portnow used the Grammys as an opportunity to highlight the importance of copyright protection, using a argument you might recognize as utilitarian: “What if we’re all watching the Grammys a few years from now and there’s no Best New Artist award because there aren’t enough talented artists and songwriters who are actually able […]

Impact of twitter’s “mass shaming” problem

Impact of twitter’s “mass shaming” problem

This article does a great job of showing the real-life impact of online harassment in the context of “naming and shaming” people on Twitter (it focuses on people who have said unintentionally offensive or stupid things which went viral and usually resulted in them losing their jobs, etc.). It gives some interesting insight into the point […]

This American Life – Online Trolling as a Limit on Expression

This American Life – Online Trolling as a Limit on Expression

Interesting piece referred to in class today, about a blogger and how she was impacted by online trolls. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/545/if-you-dont-have-anything-nice-to-say-say-it-in-all-caps?act=1#play

The Digital World Reviving Old News

The Digital World Reviving Old News

Today in class, we briefly discussed how the BCTV footage of the 1994 Stanley Cup riots is available on YouTube, and how the digital age has a memory that seems to predate the (widespread) digital age. There was an even more amazing example of that memory which came out just today. The handwritten notes of Dr. Alan Turing — the […]

Science Magazine on Mathematical Creativity

Science Magazine on Mathematical Creativity

There was a great article published today in Science about mathematicians, where their funding comes from, and how it affects the research they do (and I’ll unabashedly say that I think mathematics is one of the most beautiful forms of creativity in the world 🙂 ). This article also serves as an interesting follow-up to my earlier […]

Sim City’s Simulacrum of Poverty

Sim City’s Simulacrum of Poverty

I was recently thinking over an article that appeared in News of the Week some time back, one dealing with the phenomenon of homelessness in the recently released video game Sim City. (In case anyone missed it, it’s available here.) As it turns out, many of the player-crafted cities within the game have been suffering […]

Coding Style and Digital Creativity

Coding Style and Digital Creativity

I saw some raised eyebrows last week when I said that I could tell, in the Google v Oracle case, that two different programmers had touched the nine lines of code in question (one had written most, and another had come in to fix a minor bug), despite this never being (as far as I can […]

Creativity Without Law

Creativity Without Law

This is a webcast of a conference that took place this past November entitled “Creativity Without Law”, co-sponsored by the Harvard Berkman Center: The event will focus on the growing body of scholarship examining the on-the-ground practices of creators and innovators. That scholarship challenges intellectual property orthodoxy by suggesting that incentives for creative production often exist […]