At the Cambridge/Boston Copynight meeting for August we consumed mass quantities and had some interesting discussions about things related both to copyright, and not.

We started out with some discussion about an article Andrew posted Fashion Victims: How Copyright Law Could Kill the Fashion Industry. The point which seems most interesting to me is that here is a thriving industry which depends upon copying bits and pieces of design, because that is how trends develop.

Tom recommends the MIT OCW course 6.912 Introduction to Copyright Law

Greg London brought in a paperback copy of his new book Bounty Hunters: Metaphors for Fair Intellectual Propety Laws

We learned about a Firefox extension Accessibar which helps with accessability of Web pages that force their own idiosyncratic design on the Web browser (small type, grey on black, and so on).

There was more talk about Microsoft's OOXML file format initiative (the company is trying to push a massively complex file format specification into fast-track approval). We have talked about this before on the blog OOXML links but some more articles appeared on the Web since:
      OOXML is defective by design
      Objections to JTC-1 Fast-Track Processing of the Ecma 376 Specification v. 0.1
The latter document discusses problems both of the technical nature and the political and economic issues.

Andrew also had included this artcle comparing the situation today with international copyright pirates to what was happening in America 150 years ago.

Last but not least here is a picture taken by Tim which shows us and the chair Tim was sitting in: