Habitual readers may have noticed that I am not a fan of software patents. From time to time one reads attempts to defend them in comments, blog posts, and with less frequency in scholarly articles, but as time goes by more evidence comes to light to demonstrate that they Read more
Whenever the music industry complains about decreasing music sales, the usual culprit is piracy. The jury is still out with regards to the effect of piracy on music, but let us concede for the sake of argument that it has had some negative effect on sales. Whatever the figures are, Read more
The Costa Rican legislature has just passed Law 9048, which includes reforms to the country’s Criminal Code to create new cybercrime offences. Some of these bring the country in line with anti-hacking provisions present in international standards like the Convention on Cybercrime, such as rules against illegal access and interception Read more
If you took a random sample from news items dating from the first half of the year, you would be forgiven for thinking that piracy was dead, and copyright maximalism was the victor in the Copyright wars. Megaupload had been shut down, its data shredded and scattered to the winds, Read more
Original* Preámbulo Creemos que un Internet libre y abierto puede crear un mundo mejor. Para mantener el Internet libre y abierto, hacemos un llamado a las comunidades, las industrias y los países a reconocer estos principios. Creemos que ayudarán a lograr más creatividad, más innovación y sociedades más abiertas. Nos Read more
The United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution last week on the “promotion, protection and enjoyment of human rights on the Internet” (A/HRC/20/L.13 ). This is a ground-breaking document in the history of digital rights because for the first time we have an international declaration that equates offline and Read more
Call for Papers: 7th Gikii Workshop, 17-18 September 2012 UEA London 102 Middlesex Street London E1 7EZ UK It’s harder than it used to be to write a Call for Papers for GikII, the so-cool-it-hurts blue skies workshop for papers exploring the interstices between law, technology and popular culture. Back Read more
A coalition of individuals and organisations from the US has released a very interesting initiative, the Declaration of Internet Freedom: We stand for a free and open Internet. We support transparent and participatory processes for making Internet policy and the establishment of five basic principles: Expression: Don’t censor the Internet. Read more
I know that I am beginning to sound like a scratched record (for younger readers, I refer to this piece of old technology), but when I read headlines like BoingBong’s Last push to kill ACTA: act now or the Internet gets it, I get upset. And angry. Angry and upset. Read more
When the history of the Internet is written, June 30 2012 may be remembered as The Day The Cloud Failed. An important Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) data centre in Virginia was affected by a powerful storm which knocked out its power (prompting variations of the headline “Real clouds brought Read more