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The open educational resources movement has been picking up steam lately, even attracting the attention of legislators. What’s hot in the new Persian year (aka the start of spring) is the recently introduced “OER Bill“. What’s that, you say?

Well in its own words, it’s a bill “To require Federal agencies to collaborate in the development of freely-available open source educational materials in college-level physics, chemistry, and math, and for other purposes.”

It’s unfortunate that the issue of broadband mapping is taking up any time and energy, much less about $350 million in stimulus money. Discussion of mapping takes away from discussion of the real issue – deployment, and why large companies have to be begged to provide service to some areas while they go to court and to state legislatures to prevent others from filling the gap.

Once again the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase has selected great creative works to include in the latest version of Ubuntu, this version due out in April. As with the previous Show Case, all of the winning entries will be bundled with the Ubuntu release and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. This time, however, there were three categories, so three winners. The categories are: Audio, Video, and Image.

United States Senator Benjamin Cardin today introduced legislation that would allow newspapers to become nonprofit organizations in what he described as "an effort to help the faltering [newspaper] industry survive."

As we've discussed previously, Choruss is the name of the new entity, backed by three major record labels, that is interested in granting blanket licenses to universities (and someday residential ISPs) to authorize the music swapping (on P2P and otherwise) that has become a fact of digital life.

I write a blog at my home newspaper, The Dallas Morning News, and when I get 10 or 20 comments on a post, I am feeling pretty good about myself. Arianna Huffington? Her site, Huffington Post, draws around a million comments a month.

Congress derives its power to enact copyright laws from the copyright clause, U.S. Const. Art. I § 8. which reads: