My new column for openDemocracy comes ahead of international Day Against DRM (next Tuesday), and starts a thread of thought I want to pursue further – should we fight for our digital rights as “consumers” or “citizens”? I had an interesting conversation over coffee with someone who could be described as a veteran political insider [...]
Categories: freeculture, law, opendemocracy, politics
Yuck. Why so bad? Read this (surely the most high-fallutin’ headline of all time).
Will be writing on this over the coming weeks. Any more info or research gratefully received.
Categories: freeculture, law
This week’s column for the New Statesman focuses on botched government IT projects, and suggests that code commissioned by the government should be open.
“The recent announcement that the Financial Services Authority is investigating iSoft, the troubled computer software company charged with delivering a large part of the new, centralised patient records system for the National [...]
Categories: business, freeculture, politics
This fortnight’s column for openDemocracy centres on a book I discovered while researching a paper I am currently writing for the Ford Foundation on freedom of expression in the networked information age. The book is written by Ithiel De Sola Pool, a prolific scholar of political science and sociology. Although it was written in 1983, [...]
Categories: freeculture, law, opendemocracy
When I was a kid, I used to think working in the music industry would be, like, the coolest thing ever. In my early twenties, I started doing music writing, and started having my doubts. Then, as a tech journalist, I started meeting people from the BPI and I knew the mirror had cracked.
At twelve, [...]
Categories: business, freeculture, law, networks
This week’s column in the New Statesman celebrates 15 years of open source:
“Fifteen years ago this month, when the internet was the domain of the geeky and the good, a young computer science student from Finland sent an e-mail to a message list of programmers. ‘Hello everybody out there using Minix,’ began the message, ‘I’m [...]
Categories: freeculture, newstatesman
This week’s column in the New Statesman is on the Gowers Review of Intellectual property and a report from Rufus Pollock for the ippr:
“As the British Phonographic Industry, the body that represents the UK music business, begins a fresh assault on those who use peer-to-peer file-sharing networks to download music illegally off the internet, it’s [...]
Categories: freeculture, law, newstatesman
The ippr have just posted audio from an event I attended on Friday last week, the last in their series to accompany the UK Gowers Review of Intellectual property. Hear Lord Sainsbury (DTI), Chris Parker (Microsoft), Rufus Pollock (Open Knowledge Foundation) and Dr Richard Jennings (Cambridge Enterprise) on Innovation in the Information Age, then listen [...]
Categories: freeculture, law
(originally published on openDemocracy)
Geoff Mulgan sees two ways in which organisational principles borrowed from the world of open source can make the political process more accountable. One is in turning democracy back into a conversation, the other in allowing the people to scrutinise public services. But, he warns, there still needs to be a recognisable [...]
Categories: freeculture, open source, opendemocracy, politics
(originally published on openDemocracy)
Open standards are just as important as open debate: Becky Hogge explains why openDemocracy recommends the Mozilla Firefox web browser.
It’s funny the little things you judge people by. A couple of weeks ago one of openDemocracy’s new interns shocked me when he exclaimed “I really can’t stand this Firefox thing”. He was [...]
Categories: freeculture, open source