Home -> Law Blog Directory -> International Law Blogs -> Lightbulb IP blog

International Law

: Lightbulb IP blog

Encyclopaedia content licensing and contracts

Microsoft's announcement in March 2009 that it will discontinue Encarta provides valuable business strategy and management lessons. Encarta was an encyclopaedia offered from 1993 on a CD-ROM disc and subsequently on the web. All will end in 2009. While money was not the motivator, the crowd that clouds at Wikipedia and elsewhere on the internet has helped starve the business out of Microsoft's Encarta (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta). That crowd are computer users and they cloud in the sense that they are part of cloud computing (ip/predictions-2009-information-and-communication-technology-pa-2.html) sending content by them or others to external hosted servers. This article is a case study on 250 years of business and legal history relevant to three encyclopaedias - Encarta, Encylopaedia Britannica and Wikipedia. It is structed into three historical periods or Acts as we've called them here. Our focus is on content licensing for these three publications. The content includes images, text, video and other data. Like these publications, business consultants, authors, creators, and various intermediaries all share an interest in methods for making money from content licence contracts.

Full post as published by Lightbulb IP blog on April 16, 2009 (boomark / email).