I will be away to Rio de Janeiro to attend the second Creative Commons summit, or more accurately, the iCommons summit, as it is actually an international gathering to discuss the Creative Commons movement, and what a gathering it promises to be! As with last year’s gathering in Harvard, I Read more
I am becoming rather ambivalent about moral rights, which goes against my Civil Law upbringing. I believe that moral right of attribution is a good thing, but that the moral right of integrity can be difficult to apply, and when it is it may prove more trouble than it’s worth. Read more
In a week were we have seen the two sides of Bill Gates exposed by the press ad nauseam, it is refreshing to see Microsoft do some of the stupid things why we love them for. The Beta version of the long-awaited/feared/loathed Windows Vista has been released to testers, with Read more
The June issue of SCRIPTed, the Journal of Law and Technology, is now online. In this issue: Editorial: – Open Letter to the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property. AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law and IP Academics. Special Feature : – The Intellectual Property Incentive: Read more
The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) gave us a nice gift last week to celebrate the International Day of the Beast (6/6/6) by announcing that we could rip music into our iPods. Yes, the widely popular practice of making copies of what you have purchased is still illegal, but the kind Read more
Florian Müller, the founder of the NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign, has published his long-awaited testimonial of his role in the amazing story of the software patent war in Europe. The book is entitled “No Lobbyists As Such – The War over Software Patents in the European Union”, and it is now available Read more
I must admit that I have not been following the Net Neutrality campaign, mostly because I felt that it seemed like an American phenomenon, and also because I cannot explain it any better than a ninja. The Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act (Cope Act) is a wide-ranging piece of Read more
Pirate Bay, the Swedish-based bittorrent search engine, is back online after the raid this week to their servers, where Swedish police confiscated some index files. Pirate Bay is a tricky one for authorities because there are no copies of any shared files, the system apparently only contains links to tracker Read more
Some interesting papers from the 2nd day: – Institutional Entrepreneurs and the Bricolage of Intellectual Property DiscoursesAnn Westenholz – Open Source and e-JusticeCuno Tarfusser Unfortunately the papers are not available online, which is rather strange from an “open” conference. Why not release them under Creative Commons? I am participating in Read more
Some very good papers at the conference, I’ve been enjoying the excellent scholarship on offer, although practically none of it is legal. Interdisciplinary conferences can be tiring and challenging, but you are always open to an entirely different way of thinking. Some papers I’ve particularly enjoyed: – Evolution of Open Read more