Awesome Lecture: Copyright and Fair Use

I have been reading some stuff on Copyright and all the discussion that I have read so far feels beneath my understanding. Most of the time it is like watching two kids fighting over who gets to play with a tennis ball. And I owe that level of understanding to a lecture I once watched by Lawrence Lessig titled Is Google Book Search "Fair Use"?.

I am linking to this now because I only just realised how thankful I am that I watched this lecture. It is one of those things which I was happy with seeing at the time and have re-thought about again and again since.

Lawrence is an awesome speaker with excellent presentation skills. If you have ever had a passing interest in Copyright or Intellectual Property then I highly recommend watching this lecture because he covers the basics and then takes the debate to a much higher level.



[Direct Link]

China and Fake Brands 2.0

By way of Japanator an extreme example of a fake brand where some themepark in China is imitating Disney World.



China is currently the biggest producer of Fake Brands. That being products that look like they where made by well known and established brands, but aren't. At the moment China doesn't seem to be moving against these fake brand producers within Chinese boarders, probably because they are bringing in a lot of money, but it will hurt in the long term. As soon as china starts exporting it's own intellectual property then they are going to find that the world's distributors will happily accept these new brands as long as China respects theirs. And at that point China will have to enforce foreign intellectual property and crackdown on fake brands.