Extending Copyright Duration in Australia (PDF) — economics of copyright extension. This proposal in the “let’s dream” section at the end caught my eye: The potential trade-off between production and distribution of intellectual property can be addressed in a number of ways. Australia could offer a system of graduated copyright protection with differing durations and differing fees. If an individual truly believed that their intellectual property would be valuable seventy years after their deaths, they should pay for that privilege. This is a Coasian solution to the copyright monopoly problem — with property rights being allocated to the public domain. In essence, creators are renting a portion of the public domain. It need not constitute a barrier to invention and creative activity because, in any event, there are few copyright materials that are valuable after such a long period of time and further, if the individual’s beliefs are correct they could either raise the necessary funds by means of a loan or by selling the idea on the secondary market. If, however, they thought their intellectual property were only valuable for ten years then they would pay far less, and so on. (via wiselark on Twitter)
Heart Proposal (Apache) — a planet-scale RDF data store and a distributed processing engine based on Hadoop & Hbase. (via Hacker News)
Collections Trust: 10 Principles for Linked Data — they read to me more as articles of faith than as proven statements of fact. 4. Linked Data can help us achieve more efficient practice. 5. Linked Data can help us deliver on our commitment to Public Access. 6. Linked Data is the next phase in our adaptation to the Web. 7. Linked Data should become an embedded function of the software we use (via PeoplePoints)
