by Felix Cohen
Last night's releasethemusic event was very successful, with a healthy turn out in the beautiful Conway Hall in Holborn. The event started late, luckily for me as as usual, computers were on the blink at openDemocracy.
First speaker of the evening was Jonathan Zittrain, professor at both Harvard and Oxford (wow) in Internet Governance & Regulation, and that rarest of things; an interesting, nay fascinating, law expert (disclosure: Jonathan is also a Technical Advisor for openDemocracy). He started the talk with a discussion of what is apparently the classic legal notion of property; a bundle of sticks. All notions of property are sticks in the bundle; in land ownership this might mean that access rights, leasing rights and living rights are sticks in a bundle that is the entire ownership. That was a lot clearer when Zittrain was explaining it. Hey, it may even be worth checking out my honourable forebearer, Felix Cohen for some of his thoughts on property!
Coming back to the music question, Zittrain explained that there are two ways of looking at music IP; Section 16, the UK legal approach, and reality; the way we all consume and create our music the rest of the time.
To read more, visit Felix' blog.
