For those who still don’t have plans, EFF-Austin is co-sponsoring a SXSW party this Monday at Scholz Garten. This year’s shindig (titled Plutopia) includes music by Carl Stone, Intimate Stranger, and David Demaris; The Heather Gold Show, a talk by Bill McKibben, the Lance Van de Kamp Show featuring Maggie Duval, Omega Monster Patrol, along with a diverse set of artists, hackers, bots, and poets. Admission is $10 at the door, or you can get in free if you’re in sci-fi costume and/or you have a SXSW badge.

More information can be found here:
http://plutopia.org
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/417686/

We also still have room for a few more volunteers to take tickets at the door. If you are able to help out, please let me know (matt@effaustin.org) so I can put you on the guest list.

American University Washington College of Law’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property; Journal of Gender, Social Policy and the Law; and Women and the Law Program present the Fifth Annual Symposium on IP/Gender: Mapping the Connections. The symposium explores the rich intersection of intellectual property law and feminist theory.

April 4, 2008

10am-4pm

American University Washington College of Law

4801 Massachusetts Avenue, NW * Washington, DC 20016

Room 528

This year’s symposium will feature presentations by Anita Allen, Rebecca Tushnet, Olufunmilayo Arewa, Séverine Dusollier, Kevin Collins, Ian Kerr, Laurence Rassel, Debora Halbert, Kevin Jerome Greene and Francesca Coppa.

A full listing of paper topics and commenters, webcast address, registration and travel information, and copies of published symposium papers from prior years is available at:
http://www.wcl.american.edu/pijip/ipgender.cfm.

We encourage you to register at
http://www.wcl.american.edu/secle/cle_form.cfm
if you plan to attend so that we may accurately gauge demand for the complimentary lunch we will serve to all attendees.

Monday 1 October, 2007 at Bird & Bird, 6 pm.

BLACA is pleased to announce that David Carson has agreed to give a talk on the future of US copyright law. Mr. Carson is the Associate Register for Policy and International Affairs at the United States Copyright Office. We have also lined up two commentators: Ms. Shira Perlmutter who is the Executive Vice President, IFPI and Laurence Djolakian who is the Legal Counsel in Motion Picture Association – Europe. Dr. Gillian Davies from Hogarth Chambers will be chairing. This event is free and open to all. We look forward to seeing you and your colleagues there.

Listen to an interview / podcast here (mp3).

Whilst the one-off cost of supplying the new civil gown is estimated at about £200,000, annual savings in the region of £300,000 will thereafter be made.

That’s quite a lot of money just on formal dress. I wonder what the savings would be if they dropped the wig for the criminal side as well.

The reasons given for the change is partly due to FIVE different outfits required under the current system.

“At present High Court judges have no less than five different sets of working dress, depending on the jurisdiction in which they are sitting and the season of the year. After widespread consultation it has been decided to simplify this and to cease wearing wigs, wing collars and bands in the civil and family jurisdictions. While there will never be unanimity of view about court dress, the desirability of these changes has a broad measure of agreement.”

“Snapshot and case-studies of current usage of Creative Commons (and other open content) licences by cultural heritage organisations in the UK”

Full details will follow, but the aim is to conduct a broad survey of the use of these licences. If the results are positive, there is the possibility of progressing to an in-depth case study of several cultural heritage organisations and their use of open content licences.

This is fantastic news in advance of the 2007 iCommons iSummit happening this week in Dubrovnik, Croatia. The iSummit is a “gathering of the internet tribes” of lawyers, artists, computer scientists, academics, and geeks. From the site:

Once a year, about 300 people from over 50 countries come together to celebrate and strategise around a free Internet for all.

Leaders of the Creative Commons, free software, open education and access to knowledge communities talk about their vision for the future and discuss strategies for building a free global culture that is rich – both in terms of economic viability and geographic diversity.

The iCommons Summit is supported by cutting edge Internet companies around the world whose success is based on a free Internet – companies who recognise the potential of commons-based peer production for growing their networks and their businesses, and doing it in a way that benefits all of humanity.

I’ll be at the iSummit, so if you want to talk to me more about it in person, please look me up.  I also will be posting (maybe even liveblogging, but we will see) at the summit, but needless to say my posts will be erratic over the next week.