Different reports are coming from the meeting earlier this week on the polictics of IPRs, organised by the Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD). You can browse several reports from Patenting Lives, Axel H Horns and IP Watch. The meeting had quite an amazing number of experts brought together, and it Read more…
Christian Ahlert from Open Business has posted a very useful tool online. This is a web applet that checks the links to a specific licence from Yahoo! and displays the results. Creative Commons Scotland only has 3,074 links to the licences, while England and Wales version 2.0 licence has 69,320. Read more…
A study commissioned by the Canadian Recording Industry Association has been made public, and Michael Geist has found some interesting facts on it. Apparently, those who download the most are those who buy the most music. We already knew this, but it is nice to see more hard evidence for Read more…
(thanks to Nicolas Jondet for the link) This is a good article in The Economist about open source business models. The article goes through everything open, from source code to biotechnology, interviewing key experts. The article states that: “Perhaps that is why open source is taking up a permanent place Read more…
I was looking at the Wikipedia entry for the Open Rights Group, and I was surprised at how many people have entries on Wikipedia. I’m not implying that the people listed do not deserve entries, but reading so many interesting bios got me thinking as to how many people are Read more…
I have been involved in an argument on a mailing list with regards to the legal nature of copyleft licences such as the GPL. This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine (and talking to other lawyers, it seems like I’m not alone in this). This is the Read more…
Professor Bernt Hugenholtz has distributed a translation of the Dutch CC case, very useful for those of us who have never been to the Netherlands (unless you count transfers at Schiphol Airport). The relevant text reads: “All four photos that were taken from www.flickr.com were made by Curry and posted Read more…
(Via Terra Nova). There has been a lot of talk in online gaming circles about the gold farming phenomenon. Gold farming is the use of “virtual sweatshops” in which gamers from developing countries spend hours earning in-game currency, rare items or virtual property in order to sell it in exchange Read more…
Last weeks there were reports that police in Belgium had shut down an EDonkey server called Razorback. This server did not hold actual infringing material, it held contact data of people using the EDonkey network. As the P2P weblog suggests, this has no bearing whatsoever on the service, as new Read more…
The first case (as far as I’m aware) enforcing a Creative Commons licence has come out in the Netherlands. The case involves famous podcaster Adam Curry, who had a number of pictures in Flickr under an Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike licence. Some of the pictures were taken by Weekend, a Dutch tabloid, Read more…