D&D online

Online gaming is still making headway into the mainstream by the release of Dungeons & Dragons Online, the new version of the popular pen and paper game. It seems like the online gaming market is heating up, with other large role-playing games set for release soon in order to compete Read more

By Andres Guadamuz, ago

Attack of the patent trolls

The world’s favourite patent troll, NTP, is back in court trying to bump Blackberry makers RIM Ltd. out of the market. Welcome to the wacky world of the American patent system, where innovators are punished for being first in the market while a patent shell company gets all their profits. Read more

By Andres Guadamuz, ago

CAFTA safe?

I had previously commented that the result of the Costa Rican elections was close. After a recount of the votes, it seems like pro-CAFTA candidate and 1989 Nobel Peace prize winner Oscar Arias has won the election with a 1.1% margin. The final result has not been announced due to Read more

By Andres Guadamuz, ago

Copyright and access to knowledge

A new report on access to knowledge and the implementation of IP legislation in developing countries. The report is very critical of the adoption by developing countries of restrictive IP legislation, and it also criticises WIPO’s draft legislation. The summary says: Copyright and Access to Knowledge discloses that Bhutan, Cambodia, Read more

By Andres Guadamuz, ago

GPL v4?

(Thanks to Raffaele for the link). With the development of the GPL v3 underway, an enterprising soul has launched a GPL v4 website to preempt the debate and allow Free Software enthusiasts to conduct proper flame wars on the subject of DRM and software patents. The site offers some amazing Read more

By Andres Guadamuz, ago

Felten on CD DRM

Ed Felten has written an extensive report on the use of DRM on CDs. The report’s conclusions are worthy of reproduction: First, the design of DRM systems is driven strongly by the incentives of the content distributor and the DRM vendor, but these incentives are not always aligned. Where they Read more

By Andres Guadamuz, ago

PowerPoint woes

I’ve just come back from an interesting conference at Windsor organised by Queen Mary Intellectual Property Institute, and part of European Intellectual Property Institutes Network (EIPIN). Some of the presentations got me thinking about the use of PowerPoint. I’m always using slides, and while I admit that I tend to Read more

By Andres Guadamuz, ago

No ripping says RIAA

(via IPKat) Put yourself in the shoes of an RIAA lawyer. What is it like to be you? The money must be good, but every check arrives with the certainty that everybody hates you. You are probably the type of person who goes to a dinner party and asks the Read more

By Andres Guadamuz, ago

Windows Vista: DRM v security

More details about Windows Vista are coming out. While many aspects seem to be rather good, there will certainly some worries about some of the bundled features in the new version of Windows. One of the technologies that is making the blogosphere is the proposed BitLocker Drive Encryption. This seems Read more

By Andres Guadamuz, ago

Grid studies climate change

Distributed networking or grid computing has proven to be an excellent method of using idle processor time in computers around the world in order to crunch large chunks of data. This allows projects that would have to spend millions in buying top of the line computers to distribute the load Read more

By Andres Guadamuz, ago