I put things here so they are on the internet
Last month the Engelberg Center released Unbalanced Interests: How the § 1201 Process Ate Itself (also hosted on this site ). The report is a deep dive into the triennial § 1201 process, which is something of a marquee event in copyright policy circles, although not necessarily a particularly loved one. In the context of this blog, it is the thing that precipitates the unlocking 3D printers posts…
A dispute about a python library called chardet may be an early rumble of an earthquake in the world of open source software (OSS) and intellectual property law. The incident exposes the potential fragility of the legal model underpinning OSS in the Large Language Model era. Suddenly, open source hardware (OSHW)’s experience creating open works without comprehensive IP protections could have many…
This post is a handy reference for the technical reasons why requiring 3D printers to screen for gun parts is not an effective way to reduce guns or gun violence. I am publishing it on the occasion of both New York and Washington State introducing bills to require this type of screening. In addition to a topic that I have been researching for over a decade , the question of how to know if a 3D…
This post was originally going to be a legal analysis of the Open Community License released by the 3D printer company Prusa Labs right before Christmas. That analysis may still come. ( update 3/19/26 : It does not need to come. Kyle E. Mitchell did his trademark Line by Line analysis of the license so check it out.) However, after reviewing it, the legal specifics of the license are less…
Earlier this month, Arduino announced a new Arduino Uno Q board as part of its acquisition by Qualcomm. Is this new board open source? It is kind of hard to say, which is exactly why the OSHWA Open Source Hardware Certification exists. What Do We Know? Arduino is marketing the new Q as “open source” : And you can download manufacturing files for the board , which are licensed under a CC BY-SA 4.0…
What are the most popular open source hardware licenses? How has that popularity changed over time? Is there anything to be learned from the ups and downs of various licenses? This Open Hardware Month my modern mind, like yours, had these three questions . Fortunately, the OSHWA Open Source Hardware Certification API makes it possible to start answering them. This post has leaderboards for all of…
The Italian Competition and Market Authority is currently investigating behavior in Italy’s textbook industry. I recently filed a brief comment flagging issues that might be worth exploring in the etextbook space. The Authority’s Preliminary Report ( Executive Summary in English - thanks AGCM!) gives an overview of what they have been looking into. The full Preliminary Report spends time…
What does competition in the world of music look like without copyright? We may be on the cusp of finding out. Over the summer Emanuel Maiberg published a story on 404 Media about Spotify publishing AI-Generated songs attributed to dead artists that have nothing do to with the artists . The story captures the dystopia of managing cultural data at scale, but also contains this interesting (to me)…
Trying to decide which open hardware license to use? Not super interested in actually reading the text of licenses? You have come to the right place. There are a bunch of caveats at the bottom of this post, but let’s get to the heart of things. You Probably Want to Use a CERN License While there are number of open hardware licenses, CERN (yes, that CERN ) has released what is the most modern and…
Last week the GLAM-E Lab released a new report Are AI Bots Knocking Cultural Heritage Offline? . The short answer seems to be “yes”. The longer answer fills a report. The report exists because we started seeing one-off accounts from online cultural heritage collections that swarms of bots were knocking the collections offline. The bots were overwhelming the site as they scraped it for data to…
A team just announced the release of the Common Pile , a large dataset for training large language models (LLMs). Unlike other datasets, Common Pile is built exclusively on “openly licensed text.” On one hand, this is an interesting effort to build a new type of training dataset that illustrates how even the “easy” parts of this process are actually hard. On the other hand, I worry that some…
Moving from NYC to Berlin gave me an excuse to update my old Pi-Powered MTA Subway Alerts project for the BVG. Now, as then, the goal of the project is to answer the question “if I leave my house now, how long will I have to wait for my subway train?”. Although, in this case, instead of just answering that question about the subway train, it also answers it for trams. The full repo is available…
I made a bot that automatically translates bluesky tweets* from a list of accounts into english. It is written in python. I recently relocated to Berlin. Since I don’t speak german (yet?), I’ve been looking for ways to stay up to date with local news. There are a handful of english-language publications that cover Berlin and Germany, and I appreciate all of them. However, by necessity, they are…
This post originally appeared on the Engelberg Center blog Today the GLAM-E Lab , a collaborative project between the Engelberg Center and the University of Exeter (UK), is releasing a number of tools and resources for the open GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museum) community. First, the GLAM-E Lab has launched an Open GLAM Toolkit ! This suite of tools, developed directly with GLAM…
This week Prusa Research, once one of the most prominent commercial members of the open source hardware community, announced its latest 3D printer. The printer is decidedly not open source. That’s fine? My support of, and interest in, open source hardware is not religious. I think open source hardware can be an incredibly effective tool to achieve a number of goals. But no tool is fit for all…
Last summer I submitted a request that the Copyright Office renew an existing rule that allows users to break DRM that prevents them from using materials of their choice in 3D printers. As of October 28th, that rule has been renewed for another three years. This is good news! Copyright law should not allow 3D printing manufacturers to force users to only use approved materials. Wins in copyright…
Licensing deals between AI companies and large publishers may be bad for pretty much everyone, especially everyone who does not directly receive a check from them. Although the initial copyright lawsuits from large content companies like Getty Images and music labels are still very much ongoing (with new ones being filed regularly), recently we’ve also seen a series of licensing deals between…
It feels like any time I have a conversation about attributing data used to train AI models, the completely understandable impulse to want attribution starts to break when confronted with some practical implementation questions. This is especially true in the context of training data that comes from open communities. These communities rely on some sort of open license that requires attribution…
Earlier this year the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) , Center for Open Science , and the Wilson Center held an open science policy sprint to source and develop actionable policy ideas aimed at improving scientific transparency, equity, and innovation. Some heroic editing from the FAS team (especially Jordan Dworkin and Grace Wickerson) helped transform "uh, if the government pays for…
Earlier this year, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) requested comment on a number of questions related to what it is calling “open foundational models.” This represents the US Government starting to think about what “open” means in the context of AI and machine learning. The definition of open in the context of AI and machine learning is more complicated than…