For a couple of years those opposed to DRM have been feeling rightly pleased with the state of affairs. Technological protection measures have proved to be unpopular with the public and with many creators, as they impose restrictions on how consumers can make use of the content they have purchased. Read more…
Last night something interesting happened online, a small incident that I think illustrates the problems of instant communications quite well. Geek blog Mashable broke the news that telecomms giant AT&T was filtering access to imageboard 4chan. For those unfamiliar with this site, 4chan is a forum dedicated to the exchange Read more…
Several news sites have reported an interesting copyright case involving the Wikimedia Foundation and the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Britain. The NPG undertook a £1 million GBP digitisation exercise, and placed high-definition versions of their pictures in a database locked with technological protection measures. Derrick Coetzee, a volunteer for Read more…
So, a teenager intern at Morgan Stanley wrote a report categorically stating that teens don’t do Twitter, and you could hear thousands of social media hype-meisters screaming bloody murder. It’s almost as if a million Twitter feeds cried out in pain at once. Being the cynical person that I am, Read more…
A common argument used by those opposed to maximalist copyright reform and excessive copyright enforcement is that the answer to the problem of illegal downloads is not to sue customers and enact more restrictive legislation, but to seek out new business models. While the industry has claimed that it has Read more…
An advantage of being abroad is having access to a wide range of TV stations from Latin America. I’ve been watching news reports from the excellent TV Chile about the rise of sexting amongst urban teenagers in emerging economies. While it is difficult to filter out the moral panic prevalent Read more…
Whenever I travel back to my native Costa Rica I feel like I am going back in time. I know this may sound condescending, but having experienced the efficiency of developed societies for more than a decade, some of the many aspects of life in a developing country feel like Read more…
Who could have guessed? Social networking sites have proved to be a serious privacy threat. The new MI6 chief (who looks nothing like Dame Judi Dench), has been involved in a bit of a scandal because his wife had posted all sorts of personal information, pictures and other family details Read more…
Much digital ink has already been spent on commenting on Judge Richard Posner’s bizarrely reactionary proposal that the only solution to save newspapers is to ban linking. I usually try to avoid stories already heavily covered because most of the times I end up repeating things that some other people Read more…
The Open Knowledge Foundation has announced the release of the version 1.0 of the Open Database Licence (ODbL). As the name implies, the ODbL is an open licence which protects data contained in databases, and allows the modification, redistribution, use and reuse of such data. Databases are protected either by Read more…