This post originally appeared on the Engelberg Center blog.

This is a simple project to visualize the surface of the earth with a LED matrix. It is a way to play with open topographical data.

It's that time of the year triennial cycle again...

Last month the Engelberg Center released Unbalanced Interests: How the § 1201 Process Ate Itself (also hosted on this site). The report is a deep dive into the triennial § 1201 process, which is something of a marquee event in copyright policy circles, although not necessarily a particularly loved one. In the context of this blog, it is the thing that precipitates the unlocking 3D printers posts every three years.

A dispute about a python library called chardet may be an early rumble of an earthquake in the world of open source software (OSS) and intellectual property law. The incident exposes the potential fragility of the legal model underpinning OSS in the Large Language Model era. Suddenly, open source hardware (OSHW)’s experience creating open works without comprehensive IP protections could have many lessons for OSS.