I'm an Australian, based in the Washington, DC, area of the United States. I spend a lot of time there with Jasmine, Australia's best-known speedsolver of the Rubik's Cube. Prior to the US, Jasmine and I were based in London, UK. We have also lived previously in the United States and Australia.

I have worked for an Australian business rules and compliance company since 1999 in Australia, the US and the UK. I have also lectured in IT and Law related topics at King's College, London, and at The Australian National University.

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These are a few of my favourite links:
- Jasmine's site
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- Doug
- Marissa
- Lisaloha
- David (Greenomics)
- Paul's Ramblings (music)

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A CD we're meant to copy

This is a couple of days old, but I still thought it worth posting. I came across it in a blog run by Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law professor.

Wired magazine's November issue (out next month) will ship with a free CD containing 16 tracks that are intended for online copying and other uses that record companies normally try to proscribe. Lessig links to an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal that discusses the CD and its Creative Commons licence (which reserves only selected rights under copyright, rather than all rights as is normally the case; the Creative Commons approach encourages people to build on the creations of others with far fewer legal restrictions).

The Journal describes the project as follows:

Next month, songs by the Beastie Boys, David Byrne and 14 others will appear on a compilation CD whose contents are meant to be copied freely online, remixed or sampled by other artists for use in their own new recordings. "The Wired CD: Rip. Sample. Mash. Share." was compiled by the editors of Wired magazine, of San Francisco, as an experimental implementation of a new kind of intellectual-property license called Creative Commons. About 750,000 copies of the disc are to be distributed free with the magazine's November issue.

This makes me miss the lecturing I used to do in Information Technology Law at The Australian National University. The digital challenges to traditional intellectual property were an area we covered in some depth. Maybe I will get back to lecturing one day.