(via The House of Commons) A video parody from the University of Sidney’s Law Revue that more accurately depicts the nuances in copyright infringement. From the video: Downloading movies is not stealingCopyright is intangible propertyCopyright is a chose in actionYou would not depreciate your friend’s chose in actionDownloading depreciates copyrightSomewhatDownloading Read more
Habitual readers may have noticed that one of the repetitive memes in this blog is that copyleft licences are contracts. In Jacobsen v Katzer, and American court has agreed. The case involved Robert Jacobsen, an open source developer participating in an open source project called Java Model Railroad Interface (JMRI), Read more
An Australian teenager took forty minutes to crack the pornography filter provided by the Australian government, according to news.com.au. This will hopefully blow up in John Howard’s face, as he seems keen to be seen as taking tough action against the evils of the Internet. A teenager interested in porn? Read more
I have been meaning to to write about this column by Marina Hyde in The Guardian, but I wanted to keep some distance from it. While I welcome all sorts of articles that criticise technologies, I have been distraught by certain tone emerging in the supposedly more progressive sectors of Read more
I have received this press release where yours truly will be speaking. WIPO Seminar to Address Digital Rights Management Technologies Geneva, August 27, 2007MA/2007/30 The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is hosting a Seminar on Rights Management Information at its Geneva headquarters on September 17, 2007. Rights management information (RMI) Read more
On Day 3 I attended the Identity workshop organised by James Grimmelmann from New York Law School and Caitlin Hall from Yale Information Society. This was a surprisingly good and fruitful session, not surprising because of the organisers, but because workshop format can be quite uneven. The small number of Read more
Last night we were treated to a sumptuous and delicious dinner at Singapore Zoo, and then taken on a night safari. Tigers, lions, hippos, giraffes… but no gnus. Oh yes, there were no velociraptors sighted on the tour. As a Costa Rican, I’m always conscious about the inherent dangers built Read more
The highlight session of the conference for me was Regulating Virtual Worlds, which I was very much looking forward to. I’m sure this was intentionally built into the choice of speakers, but each of the panelists took a very clear regulatory approach to the new technology. Charles Lim Aeng Chang Read more
I’m in Singapore for State of Play V, which concludes a self-indulgent week of buffing-up my research into games and virtual worlds in preparation for next month’s Gikii 2. I’ve just come from a dinner where we were shown a documentary on businesses in Second Life, following the rise of Read more
John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, has vowed to clean the Internet by “blocking pornography, upgrading the search for chatroom sex predators and cutting off terror sites.” The PM plans to achieve this by giving all Australians a free content filter. What is it about politicians and the Internet? We Read more