Digital Media Conference 07

The 4th annual Digital Media Conference will be held June 22 in Washington DC. The keynote speaker is Alex Welch of Photobucket; conference co-chairs are Ned Sherman, CEO & Publisher, Digital Media Wire, and Paul Sherman, Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Tech Wire Publications.
Virtual worlds will be represented by Damon Taylor of The Electric Sheep Company.

Copyrights, Lessig and Helprin

Lawrence Lessig has started a wiki discussion of copyright in response to Mark Helprin's recent OpEd article in the NY Times, "A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?", who suggests that copyrights, like physical property rights, should last forever. Helprin concludes: No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.

Gardner on New Digital Media

The new digital media bring to mind two longtime considerations. As formulated by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, America has been a country of frontiers. With the New Digital Media, we have a new and essentially unlimited set of frontiers — those embodied in virtual realities.

The second feature, pointed out almost 200 years ago by the French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville, is that America is a country of voluntary organizations. The New Digital Media have spawned innumerable networks and associations, dedicated to every cause and pursuit that one can think of, and, no doubt, many that are inconceivable. Snippets from Howard Gardner's final post on the MacArthur Foundation's Spotlight.