There's a great piece in the UK Guardian today profiling Gilberto Gil, dissident, musician, and now minister of culture for Brazil. He is a huge supporter of the Creative Commons, and the profile  captures what's so great about all the Brazilian culture and intellectual property issues that make the country stand out as a citizen of the twenty-first century.

Meanwhile Britain, still hopelessly stranded in the twentieth, took one step further into the future with the launch of the Royal Society of the Art's Intellectual Property (IP) charter. John Naughton was there.

I had the opportunity to meet John Howkins, who is behind the charter, last time I was at the RSA. He was chairing a panel which included - and was dominated by - Creative Commons hero Lawrence Lessig. Howkins finds intellectual property issues "intellectually fascinating". I quite agree.