Now that I’ve hung up my hat at the Open Rights Group, I actually have time to read stuff for pleasure again. And it has been with great pleasure that I’ve read the two pieces listed below. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you’re writing about – the quality of your prose sings through. In the [...]
Categories: business, censorship, copyright, freeculture, law, media, networks, open source, politics
This week’s Reboot column is on The Best of 2600: a Hacker Odyssey:
“That evening he unpacked his books from London. The box was full of things he had been waiting for impatiently: a new volume of Herbert Spencer, another collection of the prolific Alphonse Daudet’s brilliant tales, and a novel called Middlemarch, as to which [...]
Categories: censorship, law, newstatesman
Two items of copyright geekery in this morning’s Guardian. Firstly. Alice Gould gives the legal 101 on hijacking”user-generated content” for a traditional media setting (well done Media Guardian for removing that nasty subscription barrier, by the way). Her conclusion:
The law may appear antiquated in the fast-changing world of the internet, but in most cases citizen [...]
Categories: censorship, copyright, media, politics
Yesterday was my first day working with the Open Rights Group. It’s going to take me a while to gain pace with the rest of the team, and the bevvy of projects they’re working on both in terms of campaigns (e-voting, more IP stuff, and the European Television without Frontiers legislation are all under the [...]
Categories: advertising, blogging, business, censorship, freeculture, law, music, networks, politics
My interview with Andrew Gowers has gone up on openDemocracy.
“‘Look at the debates that there have been on intellectual property since the arrival of the internet. They have been loud and shallow. They have been between people who say everything’s free and you shouldn’t pay for [...]
Categories: business, censorship, development, freeculture, law, music, opendemocracy, politics
In all likelihood, the Gowers Review of intellectual property is already written. But, as it bounces between government departments for consultation, what it is going to say is still very much up for grabs. Which makes it all the more important, if you believe copyright in sound recordings shouldn’t be extended from 50 to 95 [...]
Categories: business, censorship, law, music, politics
Classic clip from this week’s UN internet governance forum in Athens. Art Reilly, Cisco’s senior Director for Strategic Technology Policy, wriggles just a little under questioning from the audience about Cisco’s business dealings with the Chinese authorities, who use Cisco routers to filter internet traffic passing through the “Great firewall”.
My favourite part is the exchange [...]
Categories: business, censorship
Yesterday was the official launch of a website I helped create earlier this year, ChinaDialogue (Pictures from the launch here). ChinaDialogue is the world’s first truly bilingual interactive publishing platform (I’m not really allowed to call it a blog), as not only do articles appear in English and Chinese, but so do the comments underneath [...]
Categories: censorship, design, media
Amnesty International released a new report yesterday calling on Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google to stand up to China and come clean to their global customers on web censorship behind the Great Firewall. Here’s my report on it for openDemocracy:
“Could people power stop Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! from doing business with China’s repressive [...]
Categories: censorship, opendemocracy
My fortnightly column for openDemocracy has just gone live, an extension of this post of last week:
“It is nearly two decades since the British government tried to ban Spycatcher, and you would expect them to have learned their lesson. After throwing £2 million in legal expenses after the biography of former MI5 operative Peter Wright, [...]
Categories: censorship, law, opendemocracy