Creative Commons Reaches Scotland

Huzzah! Scotland now has it’s own Creative Commons license (still in draft). In case you didn’t know, Scotland’s legal system is separate from the English & Welsh system. (Via).

There’s some more information on Jonathan Mitchell’s website, and they are now looking for feedback on the drafts with the intention of having the full range of licenses available in the summer.

Lawrence Lessig will be in Edinburgh on April 2 to formally launch this, at the Edinburgh International Science Festival. But damn those schedulers if they haven’t gone and arranged it during the second half of a Hibs league game. Grr. But since it will probably be a bit of a dull game (and the big game is the cup semi-final the following week), I’ll probably bop along to meet the Professor: Cyberlaw: who controls access to ideas on the net.

US Government Ignorance

I don’t even know how to begin this story, so stupid and extreme it is.

Oh. My. God.

Provisional Patents

First post in a new category here: Scott Loftesness writes about using provisional patents, which is a new one to me.

This seems like a very effective and palatable idea, particularly for small companies and individual inventors. Given that the EU patent system is about to complete an overhaul, I wonder if they have included anything comparable to this US mechanism…