"In my previous discussions of copyright, I mentioned that I was reading Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. I've finished the book, so now I'd like to offer my thoughts..."

"As you may recall, the European Parliament's forthcoming report on the Cultural Industries has become the latest target of lobbying by the recording industry. First, they attempted to insert language that advocated that European ISPs filter and block their own users on the basis of suspected infringement. As we explained to European Members of Parliament..."

"...«Creative Commons founder and Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig is giving his final presentation on Free Culture, Copyright and the future of ideas at Stanford's Memorial Auditorium on January 31st, 2008 from 1pm-2pm. After 10 years of enlightening and inspiring audiences around the world with multi-media presentations that inspired the Free Culture movement, Professor Lessig is moving on from the copyright debate and setting his sites on corruption in Washington.»

"...Propelled by their victory, the students started the group, which they named after the 2004 book “Free Culture” by Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School. The book applies principles from the so-called free software movement — the idea that computer users should have the liberty to copy, distribute and modify software as they wish — to all aspects of culture..."

"In cooperation with Digital Freedom, Free Culture @ NYU will be hosting the first American a screening of the 2007 film Good Copy Bad Copy. The documentary highlights the current state of copyright and culture, and features prominent copyright players such as Girl Talk, Lawrence Lessig, Renaldo Lemos, and Dan Glickman..."

"At a time when the EU Commission investigates the anti-competitive behaviour of a market-dominant player, the European Parliament (EP) still imposes that same specific software choice on both the European Union's citizens and its own MEPs. OpenForum Europe, The European Software Market Association, and the Free Software Foundation Europe today launched a petition to call on the EP to use Open Standards so that all citizens can participate in the democratic process. [...] The signatories are encouraging citizens and other stakeholder groups to publicly support the objectives of the petition by signing up on www.openparliament.eu ..."

The International Organization for Standardization has voted against a proposal to fast-track Microsoft's Office Open XML format as an international standard. Here's how the vote went: all 41 of the of the countries that had worked on the proposal participated in the vote. There were 17 "yes" votes, 15 "no" votes, and 9 abstentions.

RMS: « Disney bought a US law to extend the copyright on the drawing of Mickey Mouse, but it may have lost that copyright in 1929 through an error.

A new book on PHP Data Objects has been published by Packt Publishing. The book gives you an overview of PDO, Creating a database and connecting to it, Error Handling, Advanced features.

So, if you are a PHP developer who need to use PDO for data abstraction, this is the book for you.

More details about the book can be read at: