Joe Merante's Blog

Earlier today, Carl Malamud tweeted a link to a fascinating paper about the evolution and reasons for Gandhi's prescient views and use of copyright law during his life. The combination of historical narrative, interdisciplinary research and discussion, and copyright was enough to take over the start of my Sunday afternoon. Read the abstract and download the full paper by Professor Shyamkrishna Balganesh here . The paper traces Gandhi's views during his most prolific writing periods, and anchors its analysis with examples showing three key phases: personal rejection [of copyright], reluctant engagement and strategic deployment. The first phase largely coincides with Gandhi's rejection of utilitarian philosophy primarily out of concern that minority voices would be drowned out or ignored, along with other reasons. The second is illustrated by the example of granting US and UK rights to a publisher for an autobiographical work, which Gandhi perceived as an appropriate compr...

On March 13, the deadline for filing objections to applications in ICANN's initial rollout phase of new gTLD's passed. Currently, there are 22 generic top-level domains, such as .com or .net, and 280 ccTLD's, or country code top level-domain names like .uk, in the top-level namespace. Now any entity with the money and demonstrated technical expertise can apply for .anything-you-want. As of today, 1,410 new TLDs strings have been applied for by 1,930 applicants ( data ). Some have been withdrawn . They've come in for everything from .blog to .book, so get ready for url's like "http://www.indianajones.movie".  Since its announcement, the new gTLD program has raised speech-related concerns for governments, competition claims by book publishers  and both phantom and real nightmares for trademark owners, among others. The objection and dispute resolution procedures for challenging the introduction of new gTLDs can be found here . ICANN " intends to ...