IT lawyers are always looking for the Next Big Legal Thing (and they also like grandiose generalizations, but I digress). From ebooks to iPods, you can always find an article describing the latest gadget in legal terms. For people involved in this area of law, it is always important to Read more…
Today the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties of the Australian House of Representatives has released a report on the implementation of the Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The report is supposed to look at ACTA and make recommendations to the government about its implementation. I was positively impressed with the document Read more…
We have moved a long way from the days in which any talk of IP at an international level meant calls for harsher protection to foster direct investment. The UN Conference on Trade and Sustainable Development (UNCTAD) has published a report entitled Structural Transformation and Sustainable Development in Africa, and it Read more…
I’ve been reading and watching with interest a UK Channel 4 report on the popular virtual world Habbo Hotel. For those unfamiliar with the story, Channel 4 News got a female producer to pose as an 11-year old girl for 2 months, who complains that she was subjected to extreme Read more…
After reading several tweets about it, I finally got round to reading an article by Dr Mira T Sundara Rajan entitled “Getting Paid is a Moral Right, too! Why Creative Commons Gets it Wrong” in the 1709 Copyright Blog. If I had not read the author before (and enjoyed her Read more…
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/joe_hill/status/212902087481241601″] I have just read one of the most interesting tweets in a while, and I suspect that the author’s intention was different from the actual result. In case you cannot read the code above, it is a comment from Joe Hill to Neil Gaiman complaining about how geeks Read more…
Yesterday I wrote about the anti-ACTA protests taking place across Europe, which prompted a very interesting tweet discussion with Geraldine Juarez (Storify in Spanish here). The gist of the argument is that Geraldine disagrees that there is no reason to protest, while my argument continues to be that people have Read more…
Today Europeans will be hitting the streets against ACTA. This is great, a sign of public engagement from a disillusioned generation that feels like they are not getting anything from their leaders. Something bothers me though. If I were to go to any of the protesters and asked why they Read more…
Those interested in alternative business models for the music industry may have heard about singer Amanda Palmer‘s astounding success in crowdfunding her next album through Kickstarter, where she managed to collect $1.2 million USD in donations from her fans. Whichever way you look at it, this is an incredible achievement Read more…
This is the question posed by every single Internet governance paper, every Internet regulation book. In classrooms around the world, students grapple with this very simple question. The usual answer is that nobody is in charge of the Internet. Of course, this is not entirely true, there has to be Read more…