Virtual communities and IP

The Beeb runs a story on a new report by research consultants Screen Digest on the Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG) market. The big headline in the report is that the MMOG market has now passed the $1 billion USD revenue mark from subscriptions worldwide. While big revenue is to Read more

By Andres Guadamuz, ago

The dangerous and wild Internet

Security firm Symantec has released it’s 11th Internet Security Threat Report, and if accurate (no reason to doubt that it is), it makes for some very grim reading indeed. I have taken some key findings from the summary which warrant highlighting: Symantec recorded an average of 5,213 denial of service Read more

By Andres Guadamuz, ago

SCRIPT-ed books for review

The following books are available for review for SCRIPTed. As usual, they’re allocated on a first-come, first-served basis: The Copy/South Research Group, The Copy/South Dossier – Issues in the economics, politics, and ideology of copyright in the global South, April 2006. Aurora Plomer, The Law and Ethics of Medical Research: Read more

By Andres Guadamuz, ago

BitTorrent and traffic shaping

One of the problems of moving house is getting new providers for all kinds of services. Choosing a new broadband provider is a worry, particularly if you were happy with your old ISP. Telewest (now Virgin Media) were pretty good in general, even despite the fact that they were too Read more

By Andres Guadamuz, ago

Open source Tories

(Via David Berry) The Conservative Party has turned open source, according to their website: “Shadow Chancellor George Osborne has promised that an incoming Conservative government would create a level playing field for open source software in the UK, in a move which could save taxpayers more than £600 million a Read more

By Andres Guadamuz, ago

MMORPG bubble bursting

One of the most traumatic events for the fledgling field of IT Law was the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2001, when the artificially inflated electronic commerce market suffered a re-adjustment and a crash to weed out all of the pretenders and irrelevant market dwellers, producing some of the Read more

By Andres Guadamuz, ago

Trouble with jurisdiction

While listening to the excellent podcast Digital Planet from the BBC, I heard a horror story about the problems of regulating cyberspace. While just a couple of days ago I sounded rather optimistic about the prospects of regulating online environments, this story lays bare some of the real problems of Read more

By Andres Guadamuz, ago

Open source patenting

The peer-to-patent project is almost ready to go live, reports the Washington Post. For those unfamiliar with this initiative, the peer-to-patent system was proposed by New York Law School Professor Beth Simone Noveck in this paper. If we agree that the American patent system is broken, and reading some of Read more

By Andres Guadamuz, ago