Tired of hearing copyright infringement called “theft” by all sort of people in the content industries? James Murdoch of News Corp is just the latest in a long line of industry shills who favour this wrong-headed argument. I could write a long retort to that statement, but I will simply Read more
Several press outlets have been giving ample coverage to ChatRoulette, an online video chat service that connects two random people. What seemed to be a great idea, quickly turned into a service for online voyeurs, public self-gratification and much public outrage. It also prompted one of the funniest Daily Show Read more
If you follow technology news services and blogs that are vaguely interested in digital rights issues, you must already have heard about ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. This is a multilateral trade agreement between the EU, the US, Mexico, Canada, Australia, South Korea, New Zealand and a few others, currently Read more
Read a very interesting article by Wired UK about web archiving. In my experience, one only need utter the word “archive” and audiences the world over will be immediately sent to sleep. Although by now half of my readership will be in the middle of a narcoleptic slumber, I shall Read more
GikII V, Edinburgh 2009 http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/gikii/2010.asp GikII V, The Voyage Home 28-29 June 2010 John McIntyre Conference Centre Edinburgh Call for Papers GikII returns to its place of birth for its Fifth Edition. GikII is a workshop concerned with exploring the legal interaction between popular culture, speculative fiction, and new technologies. Read more
Apologies for the sensationalist title, but that is precisely what came to mind when I read an article about how the book industry has lost billions of dollars because of book downloading. Attributor is a company that produces anti-piracy solutions, and they have conducted a study that claims illegal downloading Read more
Last week we were bemoaning the fact that record company EMI had disabled embedding of its music videos outside of YouTube, a measure that directly affected bands that rely in viral fan distribution and embedding for their dissemination, namely band OK Go. The band’s new video is called This Too Read more
(via Flowing Data) There are some surprising figures here: JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo. Enjoy!
Last week several news sources reported on the publication of a patent on news feeds granted to Facebook, but I didn’t want to comment until I had read it in full. Behold US Patent 7,669,123, protecting a system that dynamically provides “a news feed about a user of a social Read more