The Minute Memes project: reframing copyright restrictions one idea at a time, through a series of short, captivating, classroom-ready videos by award-winning artist and animator Nina Paley.

• Understanding Free Content

• The Creator-Endorsed Mark: Informed Sharing

• Balanced Buyout: How To Convert Monopolies into Markets

• Abolition or Reform?

• Great Ideas Live Forever -- But Only If We Let Them.

• Seen Any Ghost Works Lately?

• New York University Confuses Filesharing with Plagiarism

• more...

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What happens when an award-winning filmmaker releases her film for free on the Internet? Everybody wins...

Learn the unexpected history of copyright: its origins as a censorship law transformed into a monopoly to support the nascent publishing industry, and how helping writers and artists was not its goal then or now.

The "Creator-Endorsed" Mark:

A seal that enables artists to signal which distributors share revenue with them, while still allowing the artist's work to spread freely.

Learn more or see it in action...

"The Public Perception of Copyright" (Video interviews, Chicago, 2006)

To document the public perception of copyright today, we went around Chicago with a video camera over two days in the summer of 2006, asking strangers what they think about copyright...

"The Revolution Will Be Animated" (documentary by Marine Lormant Sebag)

A documentary film focusing on animator Nina Paley and her decision to release her feature film Sita Sings the Blues under a Creative Commons Share Alike license.

"History of Copyright and Information Ownership" (Talk by Karl Fogel, at the Stanford University Library, 19 Oct 2006)

The talk lasts about 90 minutes, including the question-and-answer period. The audience members' backgrounds were in library science, computer science, publishing, and law, so the Q&A is as useful as the talk.

A Music Teacher Describes How Copyright Hinders Music Education
by Janet Underhill

The Professional Suicide of a Recording Musician
by Bob Ostertag

Let the Great Cross-Referencing Begin: Google Book Search as Plagiarism Detector
by Karl Fogel

The Joyce Hatto Case: How Filesharing Defeats Plagiarism
by Karl Fogel

A Classroom Teacher on Copying vs Plagiarism
by Jessica Ferris

Supporting Open Source While Opposing Copyright
by Karl Fogel

Copyright Bibliography
Some good print and online resources for learning more about the history of copyright.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt is doing great posts on copyright trends and extreme cases.

Right to Create, a web journal about how copyright and patent law interferes with people's ability to create new works.

The Open Knowledge Foundation "Protecting and Promoting Open Knowledge in a Digital Age"

AgainstMonopoly.org, an excellent group blog on copyright and patent issues; the name says it all.

ChillingEffects.org, a clearinghouse of Cease and Desist letters sent by information monopolists to people who copy.

one small voice: publicdomain, Peter Saint-André's excellent blog on copyright and the public domain.

CopyrightReform.us, a good advocacy site (more from the "reform it" than "scrap it and start over" school), with up-to-date news about recent copyright outrages.

anticopyright.org, a list of anti-copyright resources, focusing (though not exclusively) on economic arguments.

public.resource.org makes government information more accessible to the public, fighting copyright restrictions when necessary