Gordon Brown has so far made a few mentions of intellectual property in his pre budget speech, stating that a “robust intellectual property regime” was needed to encourage innovation in the UK, vital to the UK’s competitiveness in the global marketplace. He has stated that the Secretary for Industry (Alistair Darling) will announce tighter penalties [...]
Categories: freeculture, law, politics
I’m logged on to the BBC Parliament channel this morning, awaiting Gordon Brown’s pre budget report, which should start in 15 minutes. The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property will be released after this speech.
As a precursor to the report, my column in openDemocracy asks whether the government will go with Gowers’ leaked recommendation, that copyright [...]
Categories: freeculture, law, opendemocracy, politics
As predicted, those who want the copyright terms in sound recordings extended are making a huge amount of noise this week. They’re explicit about their hope – that government will ignore the recommendations of an independent review that has taken nearly a year to complete, and give them what they think they want anyway.
If politicians [...]
Categories: business, freeculture, media, music
Ahead of its official launch after next week’s pre-budget speech (12.30, Wednesday 6 December, economy fans) the BBC is reporting that the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property will recommend that copyright terms on sound recordings should not be extended.
Boingboing may be reporting this as a victory, but the battle isn’t over yet. The government will [...]
Categories: business, freeculture, media, music, newstatesman, politics
Last Friday, Open Business, in collaboration with Bookmooch and Magnatune, held the inaugural MiniBar, a geek social meant to rival SF’s CC Salon. It was a whole lot cooler than most techie meets, being hosted in a warehouse bar off Bricklane and having actual DJs and everything.
Here I am with Open Business Hannah – you [...]
Categories: business, freeculture, networks
This fortnight’s column for openDemocracy tries to add something useful to the commentary surrounding Novell’s recent Faustian pact with Microsoft. In particular, it asks whether either the deal’s nod to non-commercial developers or Moglen’s threat to legally fork FLOSS with GPL v3 are predicted by Lawrence Lessig’s recent, controversial, “two economies” theory. My thanks to [...]
Categories: business, development, freeculture, law, opendemocracy
The Trib published a great piece on MIT’s One Laptop Per Child (known as the XO-1) initiative yesterday. It’s a shame they’ve chosen the picture they did for the website, as there are some great ones in the print copy. Plenty available on the internets, though.
New stuff I learnt from this piece:
IBM and Microsoft are [...]
Categories: design, development, freeculture
This fortnight’s column for openDemocracy is on the fate of “professional journalism” in the new media age. Since newspapers generally devote forest-loads of copy to their own fate at the hands of the internet, this is a topic I’ve steered clear of for a number of years. But here’s my tuppence worth.
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Categories: advertising, business, freeculture, law, media
Speaking of ideas-in-progress, Prof Jonathan Zittrain gave a lecture at the LSE last Friday entitled: “What would you put on the one laptop per child?”. It was basically an introduction for development types to his generativity theory, via the $100 laptop initiative, but he tested a few interesting ideas during the lecture, which are worth [...]
Categories: development, freeculture, law, networks
This fortnight’s article for openDemocracy continues on a theme:
“My column a fortnight ago (”Claiming our digital rights”, 26 September 2006) sparked a train of thought that hasn’t stopped chugging through my brain since. The piece was a celebration of the imminent victory over that most unsuitable of technologies, digital rights management, but sounded a note [...]
Categories: freeculture, law, opendemocracy, politics