machine-envy

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

So Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, whose memoir Murder in Samarkand was finally published last week after spending months in legal limbo following claims from the UK government that they damaged the national interest, has attracted fresh legal trouble in the form of copyright takedown notice from none other than the FCO.
Murray alleges […]

(originally published on openDemocracy)
What does Google mean when it says “don’t be evil”? The company’s expansion in China will reveal whether it is on the side of citizen or state, says Becky Hogge.
So it turns out Google is evil after all. Like a toddler who’s just caught Santa beating up his little helper round the […]