The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled that stem cell methods are not patentable. This is not a particularly exciting piece of news in itself, but I have taken notice because this is yet another example of regulation which I believe is informed by technophobic tendencies. During the first Read more…
Last week Yours Truly attended a WIPO conference in Geneva on Enabling Creativity in the Digital Environment. There will be a full report of the presentations and the event at the Creative Commons blog, so for now I will only make a link available about the program and my presentation. Read more…
I was not going to mention the sad early departure of Steve Jobs, the media and the blogosphere are already saturated with coverage of his death. Of all the words uttered in the last few days, I think that xkcd’s tribute (pictured) is the most adequate. The coverage has been Read more…
A civil court in Amsterdam has delivered a throwback ruling that reverses a decade of legal practice in intermediary liability. The BREIN Foundation is an anti-piracy group in the Netherlands, and it sued News-Service.com Europe (NSE), one of the largest providers of Usenet services in Europe. BREIN brought the action Read more…
This bit of news was reported by the Creative Commons Blog some weeks ago, but it deserves as much dissemination as possible. The regional court of Berlin (Landgericht Berlin) has effectively enforced a CC Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) Unported licence against a far-right party. This is great news because it is Read more…
With all of the patent suits Apple is currently filing against its tab and smartphone competitors, the title is more than justified. But the following is a personal rant that I believe exemplifies what is wrong with Apple. [Rant warning] This may be a hypocritical title, considering that I am writing Read more…