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
-
Recent Comments
-
Categories
Category Archives: law
EU software patents back from the dead 0
Thanks, TechnoLlama! 0
I’ve just seen that TechnoLlama name-checked me on blog day, and I’m chuffed to bits, especially as I get a lot of my most interesting legal titbits from his blog, like this observation on a spurious software patents winning BBC’s Dragon’s Den.
I’m gutted I can’t be at the VI Computer Law World Conference in Edinburgh, [...]
Revolution at our fingertips 1
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
Relakks, don’t do it 0
This fortnight’s column for openDemocracy is about darknets, anonymisation and crypto-anarchy. Horray!
“People who want to hide their activities online already have the tools to do so. We’re just giving those tools to the general public.” These were the words of Rickard Falkvinge, chairman of Sweden’s Piratpartiet (Pirate Party), when he revealed that [...]
Categories: law, networks, surveillance
Child star flash mobs BPI 0
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
Big Brother is watching 0
This week’s column for the New Statesman is on AOL’s search data blunder of a fortnight ago.
Since filing, there’s been some interesting developnments worth linking to, such as this story from the NYT of one searcher who identified herself from the data and this piece in the WSJ on what the search trends say about [...]
On the record: Blair wants to extend copyright terms 3
Via Technollama, this story in last weekend’s Sunday Times focuses on Cliff Richard’s campaign (blogged here in 2004) to extend the term of copyright on sound recordings, and on the Blair family’s habit of holidaying at Sir Cliff’s Barbados pad gratis since 2003. From a written record obtained by the newspaper of an internal Labour [...]
Whose space is it anyway? 0
With news in today’s UK papers that the Deleting Online Predators Act went down a storm at the House of Representatives last week, this fortnight’s column for openDemocracy asks if legislation is the right response to cases of child molestation involving social networking sites:
“Warning: this article cites language that some readers may find [...]
Categories: law, networks, opendemocracy
Property market 0
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 Crown’s copyright con 0
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