Professor Michael Geist has released what seems to me to be a landmark in academic publishing. His book “In the Public Interest: The Future of Canadian Copyright Law” is a tome filled with opinions from Canadian copyright experts. That in itself is worthy of praise, but what makes this publication Read more
The National Consumer Council (NCC) has spoken out against the music industry suing their customers, warning that this is heavy handed. Jill Johnstone from the NCC said: “The European Commission must think again before bringing in new and tougher IP laws. Criminal sanctions for infringing copyright holders’ rights must be Read more
I have finally managed to go through Stevens v Sony Computer Entertainment, the ruling from the High Court of Australia regarding modchips. In case you are too bored to check on Wikipedia, a modchip is a modification to a built-in technical protection measure in a computer game console (like PlayStation, Read more
Two hackers from the international group THr34t-Krew (do you l33t?) have been sentenced by a Newcaste court for conspiracy to cause unauthorised modification of computers with intent, or in plain language, for writing a worm that did not even create a lot of problems, but had the potential for great Read more
I have been flooded with blog comment spam, perhaps the most pernicious problem affecting blogs hosted by Blogspot. The spammers use software that searches for keywords and generates some text that directs people to a website. I had a post about hardware and I got this spam: Found a lot Read more
The Playstation mod chip case has come against the games industry. A court in Australia has ruled that mod chips are not an infringement of anti-circumvention legislation as present in the European Information Society Directive, the WCT and the DMCA. The full text of the ruling is not out yet, Read more
Thursday is privacy day, and we have been presented with two contrasting presentations. First Carlos Gregorio from Argentina gave a very interesting presentation about privacy concerns in Latin America, making specific comments about the theoretical distinctions between certain terms, such is intimacy, privacy and information self-determinism. Then Lilian Edwards has Read more
It is early morning here in Santo Domingo and the IP programme has just begun with a talk by Victor Vasquez from WIPO, with an interesting presentation of the work in WIPO regarding copyright in the digital domain. Amongst the work is the implementation of the WIPO Copyright Treaties, the Read more
Here I am in Dominican Republic enjoying a good conference (really). Yesterday we had a very interesting workshop dealing with policy issues, and today we are attending an interesting set of talks about internet governance. More details about the conference later.