NICAR Book Club Recap, and April book selection

We had an excellent turnout at the News Nerd Book Club meetup in Denver. The book of the month was Cory Doctorow's Information Doesn't Want to be Free, which focused on copyright law and non-news content creators. (tl;dr here)

Our discussion was wide-ranging, and topics covered included:

  • Clickthrough licenses and other licensing formats that are restrictive by default
  • The gradual erosion of the public domain through Mickey Mouse laws
  • News nerd teams' approaches to licenses and collaboration, license choice versus no license
  • Licenses on open datasets created by news organizations
  • The sources of funding available to news organizations: Doctorow identified sales of physical product, ad sales, sales of swag, donations, ticket sales and commissions

There was also peach pie.

We haven't decided a book for April's book club meetup yet. Here's a list of books that have been suggested. What would you like to read?