Copyright-sharing group delves into science, in CNET News.com. From the CC website, a Proposal to Explore a Science Commons:

Creative Commons is a disinterested party with remarkable experience in the formation and deployment of well-written, accessible, machine- and human-readable licenses that guarantee wider availability of material while preserving some selected intellectual property rights. Along with scientists, patent and university IP lawyers and scholars, we believe that this particular conjunction of features might encourage an enormously valuable thaw against the freeze-in of scientific data. We anticipate that there will be a major role for well-written, standard form, machine- and human-readable agreements:

• Between funders and grant recipients, requiring greater access to data.

• Between universities and researchers, prohibiting collectively the most toxic types of restrictions on data, and guaranteeing a level and open playing field of access to data.
• Between government agencies who are purchasing data from or providing data to, private commercial concerns, so as to develop standard terms that benefited the public and research as a whole.
• In any or all of these areas, a Science Commons division of Creative Commons could play an important role.

[via BNA’s ILN]

In NTK:

Last year, Microsoft had 4,000 patents in total. This year, they applied for another 3,000. They are now planning at least twenty IP cross-licensing deals with other large corporations, and have made it clear that they are seeking similiar alliances with even their worst enemies. This April, they quietly offered a « Royalty Free Protocol License Agreement » on their site. It generously allows the license of « any intellectual property rights Microsoft may have in any or all of [the following] protocols ». The 130 protocols listed included Appletalk, most of TCP/IP – and everything else, from DNS to Zmodem, from DHCP to the port 9 discard service (whose sole function is to drop packets). Signing this license frees developers from being sued for IP infringements by Microsoft, but prevents you from working on GPL software (Samba already warns its contributors not to sign it). This week, Microsoft indemnified all their customers from the legal fallout of any court cases revolving around their IP. Which implies there is either about to be such a battle: or at least Microsoft wants everyone to think there’ll be one. Put this week in your diaries, ladies and gentlemen of the Internet: you don’t need Yoda to tell you that the Patent Wars have begun.

More context in Groklaw

[via IP]

Boing Boing: Save Canada’s Internet from WIPO

Canada is strongly considering ratifying the 1996 WIPO « Internet Treaties. » These are the treaties that caused the USA to implement the loathsome Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and they’ve wrought untold damage around the world.

In a Globe and Mail article

Protecting ourselves to death in First Monday

There have been quite a few canadian centric copyright articles in the recent weeks… This one is definitely worth a read.

Ironically, while professing fear for their cultural sovereignty, and following the paths of their own internal political, bureaucratic, and rhetorical culture, Canadians appear to be constructing a copyright policy in complete harmony with the needs of American and international capital. I explore a proposal to license educational Internet use, endorsed by parliamentary committee, as one example of the relationship between protection rhetoric and policy development. By casting the Internet as more of a threat than an opportunity, copyright policy developers in Canada are gravely misunderstanding and threatening Canadians’ use of this medium.